Brittany, the young woman many of you helped bring down her student loan debt so she could enter the convent…has met her goal.

Jen Ambrose is back in China and, as usual, has fascinating and pity posts about life there in general, and life as a Catholic, sometimes, as well.

Fr. Philip Powell is on a journey:

I am leaving very early Friday morning (last Friday) with a group of 19 University of Dallas students to make a mission-pilgrimage to Lima, Peru! We are headed south to visit a few Catholic orphanages there and to help spruce up a small church Sunday school building. We will be going under the guidance of mission experts from the Buckner International Group, an ecumenical organization that supplies shoes to the poor of Peru and other South American countries.

Mike Liccione wonders about the Sobrino notification:

A great deal of work obviously went into this. But I don’t quite get why. All the theological concerns the notification addresses have been well addressed in the past by the man who now happens to be pope. As in many other such cases, nobody with the education to understand Sobrino and the inclination to like his work is going to have their mind changed by this notification. And those with the requisite education who dislike his work dislike it for essentially the same reasons the CDF gives. So why bother belaboring Sobrino’s case?

I can think of only two reasons. With the Chavez era in full swing, Sobrino is as popular as ever in Latin America, where Catholicism is still the majority religion. And merely denouncing errors in general terms allows their proponents to deny that they in particular commit those errors. We learned that during the Modernist controversy of a century ago. Fair enough. But with all due respect to Cardinal Levada, Fr. DiNoia, and the Pope himself, the resources available to orthodox theologians working for the Vatican are limited and could well be put to more pressing uses. (One might even say the resources are more limited than the manpower: when asked how many people work at the Vatican, Pope John XXIII replied: "About half of them.") So, in an era when the Church in the so-called "developed" countries is beset by relativism and hedonism, going after liberation theology yet again seems like a waste of energy.

Fr. Newman says "Cantors always break the Fourth Wall."

The sacred liturgy, though not play-acting, does have the character of a sacred drama, and each of us is assigned a role in the celebration of the story of redemption, the Paschal Mystery. If each member of the assembly takes part in this celebration according to his assigned role, then all of us can be lifted out of ourselves in order to be lifted up to the Throne of Grace. But this requires all of us to trust the power of sacred ritual and to observe the ritual form of the liturgy without improvisation, and the mere presence of a cantor whose task it is to instruct the congregation and exhort us to sing makes that common surrender to and participation in the sacred drama of liturgy impossible. In other words, even when he executes his duty flawlessly, the cantor cannot help but destroy the fourth wall and thereby negate the possibility of transcendence in ritual prayer, which is why we must banish the cantor from our midst to re-enchant the sacred liturgy.

Learn all about the Ambrosian Rite here:

I have always been struck by the similarity of Ambrosian music, which sounds almost nothing like Gregorian chant, to the music of the Greeks; it is “in a different modality altogether”, as the master of an Ambrosian choir once said to me. And yet, it is also full of the lengthy melismas that were characteristic of the ancient Gallican liturgy, and the language of the rite is, of course, Latin. These aspects, combined with fact that externals such as vestments and church architecture almost identical to those of the historical Roman Rite, create the impression of a liturgy from an age when the traditions of the various churches of Christendom had not yet separated from each other. Indeed, there are scholars who believe that in some respects, the Ambrosian Rite is simply a very archaic form of the rite once used in Rome itself.

Told you it was "varia."