Weekend 501.0 (ex opere operato)

“in surety of salvation we be felowes with angels.”
– Thomas More

More quotes from The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy:

“Four times a year the parish priest solemnly pronounced the Greater Excommunication or General Sentence to his parishioners. This formidable curse listed a comprehensive range of offences against the Church, its personnel, and precepts…Since much of the General Sentence was aimed at those who laid hands on the property or challenged the jurisdiction of the Church, including its monasteries, Henry VIII was to forbid the reading of it.”

“It was true that a Mass said by a sinful priest was nevertheless effective, but that was because the sacraments worked ex opere operato not ex opere operantis: the true author of the act here was not the individual priest, but the whole Church, which subsisted perpetually in grace and charity.”

“In attacking monastic “superstition”, then, Cromwell’s men were striking at institutions with a central place in popular religious practice, perhaps most unexpectedly in the domestic intimacies of pregnancy and childbirth. In such widespread evidence of the integration of monastic shrines into the fabric of popular religion, however, visitors saw, or chose to see, nothing more than evidence of large-scale exploitation of simple believers.”

“…increasingly the break with Rome meant a change of priorities…the orthodoxy which mattered most to the regime was adherence to the new doctrine of royal supremacy [emphasis mine].

(1) Fr. Don Calloway, MIC: The Rosary: Spiritual Sword of Our Lady (YouTube)

(2) End Times: What Signs to Look For (Part 1) (YouTube)

The scan is from the The Art and Craft of Stained Glass by E.W. Twining

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