Consecration for the Chapel at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary FSSP

Thanks to Kimberlee's correction below, I should have stated that the ceremony will actually take place Wednesday, March 3, 2010. Thank you for catching this, we may now be able to watch it live! See the link Kimberlee provided below. The long awaited chapel, unveiled with Wednesday's ceremony, will mark a milestone for the Catholic Church in America.

The symbol of a seminary using a chapel designed by Thomas Gordon Smith using classical Catholic architecture for a liturgy of the Latin Mass with Gregorian Chant spiritually resonates across the continent. Its mere presence in our nation gives us hope for bringing our American Church out of lukewarmness, out of a modernist rigidity, and a return to the sacred. It is a blow to stiff necked modernists. After all, our outward actions display our relationship with God. If we have high respect for God's temple, we will give Him our best architectural design, give Him our best act of reverence and worship that should alone be given to God different than what is given to man. Our modern forms of worship today in the American Church unfortunately fall short in many ways to meet such heights of a reverential relationship with God. They sure relate to man, but we pray to God not to man. Sundays especially are set aside, by divine precept, as the Lord's day - not man's day. Let's pray that our Church in America, to paraphrase St. Thomas More, when its head is finally done spinning, will find itself facing the right direction (not just talking ad orientem).

Below is an article excerpt from a Nebraska paper. Click here for full article:

Much of the demand for Latin Mass comes from younger Catholics seeking a return to the old ways of worship.

Experts may see Latin as a "dead" language, but it is ideal for the church because the meaning of the words stand the test of time, Lee said.

"Thus Latin is excellent for theology and the transmission through succeeding ages of the unchanging - and unchangeable - doctrines in which the continuity of precise meanings is necessary among different cultures and times," he said.

"Also, one finds the sound of Latin to be sublime and lofty, devoted as it is uniquely to the worship of God."

Catholics do not need to understand Latin to appreciate the Latin Mass, Goodwin said.

In fact, it was only when Mass was said in the language of the community that "people drifted to the idea that the primary point of Mass was to understand everything that was said and going on," he said.

"Mass is not a lesson or a class, or a primary form for the exchange of information.

"The primary point (of Mass) is not to understand it for the information conveyed. The primary point is to be present with your heart and soul as our lady St. Mary and St. John were present at the foot of the cross," Goodwin said.

Mass is the re-presentation, in an unbloody manner, of the sacrifice of Calvary in which Jesus offered his life to atone for the sins of all humanity, Lee said.

Catholics attend Mass to "understand the experience and the reverence and the devotion and the solemnity that are proper to the worship of God," Goodwin said.