As Cardinal Mercier said : "When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere."                                                                                  From Cardinal Sarah : "In order to avoid hearing God's music, we have chosen to use all the devices of this world. But heaven's instruments will not stop playing just because some people are deaf."                                                                                              Saint John-Paul II wrote: "The fact that one can die for the faith shows that other demands of the faith can also be met."                                                 Cardinal Müller says, “For the real danger to today’s humanity is the greenhouse gases of sin and the global warming of unbelief and the decay of morality when no one knows and teaches the difference between good and evil.”                                                  St Catherine of Siena said, “We've had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence.”                                                  Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”                                                Brethren, Wake up!

ARCHIVE - RESTORATION MASS OF PLUSCARDEN ABBEY

At this joyful time when the monks of Pluscarden Abbey celebrate the election of their new Abbot, Father Alselm Atkinson, to whom we extend out most sincere good wishes and prayers, and as the Church in Scotland celebrates the consecration and installation on the Feast of the Assumption of Abbot Hugh Gilbert, O.S.B., until now Abbot of Pluscarden, as the fifty-first and eleventh bishop of Aberdeen on 15th August 2011, it seems a good moment to air a short piece of historical footage, the consecration of Pluscarden Abbey on the 8th September, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, (Victory Day to the Order) in 1958.

The abbey, a ruin for 500 years, had been bought and given to the Benedictine Order by Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart, a noted Scottish Catholic layman, son of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, and therefore a cousin of our beloved and late Grand Prior, Fra' Fredrik Crichton-Stuart. The community was founded by Benedictine monks from Prinknash Abbey.

Fra' Freddy had a great and long-standing love of Pluscarden (he joined the Order of Malta when the restored Abbey was only five years old!) and made the great majority of his retreats there. Abbot Gilbert attended his funeral in Edinburgh.

Lovers of the Sacred Liturgy will be entranced by the simple beauty of the monastic vestments, and the grace and ease which attend these complex ceremonies, despite the fact that they were being undertaken in the setting of a ruin, and by people who had come together for the first time form many disparate places. Therein lies both the wonder and the benefit of our Catholic tradition. What we see here represents, in a way, Fra' Freddy's liturgical ideal, an unmannered and masculine religion; it shows the tradition from which he came, and the direction in which he had wished to lead the spiritual life of his Grand Priory.


We are indebted to Mr Martin Gardner, of A Wandering Oblate blog, for uploading this footage, and to the Abbot and community of Pluscarden for permitting it to be copied from their archive.