Status Updates From On the Most Holy Sacrifice ...

St. Robert Bellarmine’s feast day is coming, so I am ramping up my reading of his book on the Mass. It’s definitely not light reading but I have legit laughed out loud on a few occasions. I am convinced that he’s secretly the patron saint of the mic drop moments in comment sections.

Still a challenging book, but it’s getting more entertaining too.

I wondered why Luther hadn’t shown up in the first hundred or so pages. It’s because his reasoning is so laughably bad that Bellarmine pretty much just quotes and paraphrases him without feeling a need to engage. It would be hilarious if not for the fact that so many souls were lost because of him.

Smart, well researched and translated to be as readable as possible. Kind of a slog, but the last St.Robert Bellarmine book I read started slow and got more interesting as it went along. This one seems to be doing the same thing.

It’s good, but slow going. There’s so much evidence for his case in the early Church Fathers, that St Robert ends up whacking his adversaries’ heads with repetitive evidence that they have no idea what they are talking about.

I had to set the book down when I read the line “In 1534 [Father Martin Luther] published a book on private Mass… in which he was not ashamed to confess that the devil taught and persuaded him that the Mass is the chief abomination…” I already knew that, but to read that millions of Christians would never have the Holy Eucharist because of something so blatantly satanic jabbed into my heart again.

Another great writing from St. Robert Bellarmine.

This book is DENSE. Mostly scanning at this point. But part two looks to be more practical and simple, much less etymology so I appreciate that already.