How to Live a Traditional Catholic Life

Fr. Alexander L. A. Klauder wrote this short book at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Ogdensburg, N.Y., because the same questions kept coming up and the same mistakes kept being made. His answer was a plain set of rules a family could keep in the house and consult on the days that come rarely: the baptism, the sick call, the funeral, the wedding, the fast day.

The godparents’ answers at a baptism are printed in full. A dying infant can be baptized by anyone present with water from the faucet, and the exact words are given. Whoever is sent for the priest gets a list of what to tell him, and is never to be a child. The sick-room table is laid out item by item, with drawings of the room done right and done wrong, and the bride and groom are walked through the wedding with a diagram of who kneels where. In church the book covers the postures at Low Mass and High Mass, where to genuflect and where not to, the Communion cloth, how to begin in the confessional, and the reasons a confessor may withhold absolution. At home it covers the family prayers, blessed candles, palm and holy water, the scapular and the rosary, and the fasting rules.

Fr. Klauder writes as a pastor who has seen all of it go wrong. He is blunt about late funerals, rice at the church door, flowers and granite bought when Masses would do more good, and borrowing money from the priest. He is just as careful to say when something is only a custom and no sin. Read it once through, then keep it where you can reach it.