Remember my post Dear Traditionalists? I wrote: “It’s ‘grind it out’ time.”
Here’s some grit for your grinding.
I saw this interesting post from SLAP (Survivors of Liturgical Abuse in Parishes), linking to Regina Magazine. There is a post called “True Grit”. This caught my eye, of course, as I hoped there would be some great John Wayne spirit in it.
There is an interview.
Have a look.
From a reader:
Would it be an abuse to use an eastern thurible in the Roman Rite even if the bells are removed? Sometimes it seems more efficient to use especially in Eucharistic processions.
I don’t know that it would be an abuse… except perhaps a gentle abuse of our Roman identity.
Easterners have their ways and we have ours.
For those who don’t know, the Eastern thurible has a shorter chain for one handed-use, is often replete with bells. There is also an abbreviated censor with a handle. The Roman thurible, with its longer chain, is used with two-hands and in a slower, more deliberate manner.
I don’t see how Easternizing or Byzantinizing our stuff is desirable. This applies also to new church architecture.
“But Father! But Father!”, some of you are leaping about to squeal, “I like Byzantine things! It’s so spiritual! And, besides, Vatican II did away with the Roman Rite. But you don’t care, ’cause you hate Vatican II!”
It seems to me that there has been a trend toward this.
It makes sense, when you come to think of it, given how we Romans trashed our own perfectly acceptable liturgical heritage and abandoned nearly any trace of the transcendent in our liturgical worship far and wide for decades. People hunger for that! In the vacuum we created, Eastern things started to creep in. It’s understandable.
I have nothing against Eastern liturgical practices! I think it is great when Eastern Catholics use them. I deeply appreciate the Divine Liturgy. We Romans, however, should reclaim and revel in our Romanitas, which is second to none when properly implemented and fostered. The Roman Rite is not less “spiritual” or “transcendent”, so long as it is allowed truly to be the Roman Rite.
So, Eastern-style thurible… okay. But I think Roman hands should use the Roman ways.
That said, rather an Eastern censor than one of those things that looks like Sputnik or something that crawled out of a drain pipe. Or, worse, those pagan bowls with which the usually over-weight and often chiffon-clad dance around. BRRRRR!
And, if I may add, not everything has to be “efficient”. Processions are, by their very nature, extravagant.
And since we are on the topic of censers, here is another option:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpvHaH36anA&feature=player_embedded
And something more cthonic is here – especially the groovy music:
UPDATE 29 March:
Someone wrote to remind me of my post
The use of an censer by an Eastern cleric in the Roman Rite is featured! Don’t miss that one. A classic.
In the last few days I electronically printed a couple posts (HERE and HERE) in which I talked about how the highly-organized, spiderweb-like Left, uses networks of small front groups to mask the activity of larger initiatives. I applied that to a splinter group of truly weird sisters in a dissident group called NCAN. They say openly what the LCWR would like to say openly. It doesn’t matter whether or not the arrangement is formal or informal. This is how the Left thinks and works.
In those posts I used what seems on the surface to be a far-out analogy to make my point. NCAN is something like a faction of the Viet Cong who fronted for a larger Communist political initiative. The Viet Cong were the true radicals who could do what the political party couldn’t do. The VC also opened up the Ho Chi Minh Trail (MSNBC, the lefty-MSM) to provide supplies, arms, personnel for their projects in the south. A stretch? Sure. But not so much of a stretch as one might think.
Today at the National Schismatic Reporter (aka Fishwrap) I found a piece by none other than Janice Sevre-Duszynska, she of the famous Ordination Tambourine. The NSR proudly accepts her claim that she is a “Roman Catholic Womanpriest”. She wrote about a talk given by a seriously radical nun, Sr. Teresa Forcades, from what I can tell pretty much a Communist. You can read the NSR article to get a sense of the rhetoric and her now cliché code. For example:
Francis has denounced the “idolatry of money” and implored world leaders to assure all people “dignified work, education and healthcare.” In a way, Forcades takes it further by advocating that the state must be challenged from the bottom up. The people must be the agents of change. [Get it? Review Paolo Feire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, strongly influenced by Marxism and which, in turn dovetail with Liberation Theology and Black Liberation Theology.]
“When I talk about church, we talk about how the Gospel inspired us. There are many kinds of church, [What sort of ecclesiology is that, exactly?] and I identify with the people at the bottom, at the base. [So, it’s “class struggle”.] Many people have a hope that the Catholic church might change because of the pope, but if you look at history, change comes from bottom up, not from top down,” Forcades said to a room overflowing with “local radical activists” invited to her March 18 talk at Baltimore’s Red Emma’s, a bookstore coffeehouse.
The NSR piece is full of this stuff.
What emerges, however, when you start drilling, is a web of connections between Women’s Ordination, Communism, Liberation Theology, health-care reform, workers cooperatives, Communist terror groups, the Black Panthers…
Think I am making this up?
I direct your attention back to the venue for this talk for “radicals”: Red Emma’s in Baltimore. The name itself took me to their site to explore for a while.
What sort of people are the excommunicated Janice, the Fishwrap, and the radical-Lefty sister in with?
Go crawl around in the Red Emma site for a while. Take a look at their “about us” and see who their patron saint “Red Emma” was. She “was among the first international observers to condemn the bureaucratic authoritarianism which would smother the initial promise of the Soviet experiment. Emma always understood that a revolution needed to be nutured [sic] by revolutionary culture….”
Moreover, they admit that they are anarchists and Communists, though they say they are “radicals”:
“At Red Emma’s, we’ve decided to call ourselves a “radical” project, rather than an “anarchist” or “communist” one. This doesn’t mean that we think anarchism and communism have nothing to offer as ways of thinking about what’s fundamentally wrong with the current world, and how to go about fixing it. But as a space that’s intended to welcome both people who have been in the struggle for decades and people just getting their feet wet for the first time, we felt that committing ourselves to a label and a specific ideological tradition was unecessarily [sic] limiting. The people working on the project may be anarchists or communists, but the space is both and neither, or something else entirely.”
The cafe/bookstore hosts lots of talks. Recently they have had presentations (I think these are more practica, “how to” talks, rather than merely historically informative) about The Red Army Faction (aka Baader-Meinhof Group), and the Black Panthers, which keep popping up in their presentations and blog posts.
Looking at the bottom menu of Red Emma’s site you find links to the Industrial Workers of the World and US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
Moreover, the websites just mentioned, and Red Emma’s itself are pretty spiffy. They are not slapped together by amateurs.
What’s going on?
This is more than just “birds of a feather”. This is positive cooperation. All these ideas and speakers and events at places like Red Emma’s are integrated.
The National catholic Reporter reported positively about this event for this radical left-leaning nun, written up by an excommunicated women who attempted ordination.
I note with approval the appointment of a new Archbishop of Liverpool.
Most Rev. Malcolm McMahon, Bishop of Nottingham has been translated.
My English clerical friends are writing with their views and I am, so far, optimistic! Yes, yes… some think he leans towards the Left on some points. First, I don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and neither should you. Second, I am not sure what those Left points might be. The general consensus among my contacts is that he is “kind” and “holy”.
And he is favorable to traditional liturgy, which is a solid foundation for everything else he does.
Those of you will long memories will recall that my friend Fr. Tim Finigan wrote about his participation at one of the Merton College liturgical conferences. Here is his post from 2008. Fr. Finigan has also chimed in today HERE. In 2008, Fr. F wrote:
After dinner, Bishop McMahon was invited to speak. His address was warm, humorous, inspiring and – most significantly – a genuine, positive, generous affirmation of all that the conference was trying to achieve. Normally, I would hesitate to publish anything concerning an unscripted speech on a private occasion. Two things prompt me to do so. First, Bishop McMahon, in an aside, obviously intended to amuse those present, acknowledged the presence of a reporter from the Tablet. The reporter was a good chap and I am sure we will see a balanced report – but the point is that His Lordship’s remark in the context of an after dinner speech was obviously intended as a laugh with those who were present, most of whom, shall we say, do not entirely agree with all that the Tablet publishes.
My second reason for venturing to comment on Bishop McMahon’s speech is that when leaving the bar after spending a brief but not stinting time socially with the clergy after dinner, he encouraged me personally to “keep blogging” and jokingly said that he wanted his photo on my blog. (Happy to oblige, My Lord!)
Bishop McMahon unequivocally affirmed his support for Summorum Pontificum, for the liturgical “project” of Pope Benedict and for a conference at which priests were learning to celebrate the usus antiquior of the Roman Rite.
The comment that everybody remembered was when His Lordship referred to Pope Benedict’s desire that the two forms of the Roman rite should enrich each other. He said that the older form should enrich the celebration of the newer form and that the newer form should enrich the older form. In a light-hearted aside, he then said that it was hard to see how the newer form could enrich the older form. There was much banging of tables, laughs and applause at this remark. This morning, Dr Laurence Hemming dutifully reminded us that many people think that some more prefaces might be an enrichment of the older form (though he also made clear his opposition in principle to the idea of the “reform” of the liturgy which is a gift from God.)
What I think Bishop McMahon’s heartwarming speech did most of all was to convey to those gathered that he was not simply there as a token prelate but that he really enjoyed taking part actively, that he supported our work, and that he was prepared to crack some jokes that he knew we would enjoy, being entirely on our wavelength and, as they say, reading from the same page.
His address was met with a joyful and enthusiastic standing ovation by the priests present and some fellows started us off singing the Ad multos annos to His Lordship, followed by the first verses of “Faith of our Fathers” and “God bless our Pope.”
Bishop McMahon has certainly won the hearts of the priests who came to Merton. All of a sudden, there is someone that many priests loyal to Pope Benedict will be watching closely and including in their mementos at the Mass.
Ecce Sacerdos Magnus!
This appointment will have liberals in the English-speaking world, not just in England, involuntarily shivering.
First, it means that Pope Francis is not crushing clerics who are favorable toward Summorum Pontificum. I am sure that what Bp. MacMahon thinks about the Motu Proprio was not the major factor in his appointment, but you can bet that it was a factor! I have little… indeed, very little… doubt that his support of the Motu Proprio was used by certain circles as a way to ding him from the list. FACT: It is possible to support the Extraordinary Form, as a bishop, under Francis. (Pssssst…. I know no bishop out there is watching out for his career any longer, as of March 2013, but … I’m just sayin’….)
Also, this means that the influence of Archbp Mennini, the Apostolic Nuncio in Ol’ Blighty, has not waned.
Moreover, I am beginning to think that Francis, like Benedict before him, is doing in England what John Paul II did in these USA. I think he is consciously involved with the appointment of a certain kind of bishop. In these USA, JP2 focuses for years on the midwestern sees and created, over many years, a kind of critical mass that would begin to perpetuate itself. It may be that we are seeing that in the UK. Time will tell.
In any event, with Bp. Davies on the Shrewsbury side of the Mersey and Archbp. MacMahon on the Liverpool side, there is some real potential. Congratulations to the people of Liverpool.
I have written now a couple times about the whacky fringe group of nuns, NCAN, led by the pro-abortion Sinsinawa Dominican Sr. Donna Quinn. HERE and HERE
Now I see at the National Catholic Register that Anne Carey, whose book I have promoted, Sisters in Crisis Revisited: From Unraveling to Reform and Renewal, has gotten into the fray.
I was amused to see the title of her piece: ‘Nuns’ Gone Mad.
I wonder if she was subliminally channeling my Nuns Gone Wild. A must read.
In any event, GMTA. (I like my title better, if you get my drift.)
Carey’s book is worth the time, if you are interested in what went wrong with the sisters in these USA.
Reminder: I think the ultra-looney NCAN, pro-abortion, contraception, women’s ordination, etc., is doing and saying openly what the LCWR would like to be doing and saying, but can’t. NCAN serves as a front group for the LCWR.
When I have posted about good causes that need support (read: money) you readers have always been prompt and generous.
Were every reader of this blog to give up buying their coffee or a sandwich today and make a donation… on this Friday of Lent…
I ask you to be prompt and generous on this Lenten Friday of penance and almsgiving. Please do as the ancient Romans did during their Lent: donate money they would have spent on food to the poor.
There are poor Benedictine monks who need help. Today, for the Benedictines, is the feast of St. Benedict.
The monks of Silverstream Priory, Fr Mark Kirby’s monastery, need money. They have been pretty much begging for money, because they may lose their property. They have received 100,000 euro. They still need 500,000 to buy the property.
They also have vocations. Those vocations are at risk.
Fr Mark says:
“Promising young vocations are knocking at our door, but the door does not belong to us, nor does the house, nor the land. The future of Silverstream Priory is at stake. Please do something to re–establish monastic life in County Meath, not far from the Hill of Slane where Saint Patrick, long ago, kindled his Paschal Fire.”
Half the people on Earth are writing to me about this. Let’s file this under “Lighter Fare”?
An Ursuline sister sings on one of those “who has a talent?” TV shows in Italy.
Since half the planet is writing about this, I post. If you have snarky blah blah about sisters not singing on TV shows, just keep it to yourself, unless you can think of something original and interesting and less bilious than I expect.
BTW… in the North, which is where most of you readers are, it is the first day of Spring, the Vernal Equinox, today. We are interested in this day especially because we date Easter as the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal Equinox.
Some discussion is arising in the Catholic blogosphere about, well, the Catholic blogosphere. This week, for example, the UK’s still best Catholic weekly, The Catholic Herald, has an opinion column: Bishops and bloggers: there is a way out of this impasse.
There is some tension. Okay, fine! Is this a surprise? When hasn’t there been tension? Answer: before the snake slithered into the tree.
Some ways to alleviate the tension are available, though all them will require patience and humility on both sides.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, since I have been at this for a long time, just about longer than anyone else out there, as a matter of fact, and on a wider scale to boot.
I started at the top with a mention of The Catholic Herald. It is slightly ironic that I had an op-ed piece about this same matter in the same Catholic Herald back in November 2009.
What did I write then?
Let’s review:
In his 2002 Message on Social Communication our late Holy Father John Paul II wrote about the internet:
For the Church the new world of cyberspace is a summons to the great adventure of using its potential to proclaim the Gospel message. This challenge is at the heart of what it means at the beginning of the millennium to follow the Lord’s command to “put out into the deep”: Duc in altum! (Lk 5:4).
In all ages of the Church’s mission to preach the Good News, Catholics consistently made use of the best available tools of social communication. The Apostles wrote letters which were in turn read aloud and recopied for wider distribution. The Emperor Constantine let bishops use the imperial postal system and they so over-taxed it that it nearly collapsed. Monks copied manuscripts. When people learned to make thin soaring walls of stone, stained-glass illuminated the literate and unlettered alike with the mysteries of the faith. We made use of the printing press. We had one of the first significant radio stations. There was a Catholic-friendly film industry. For decades Servant of God Fulton Sheen’s broadcasts were vastly popular in the United States. A simple woman religious named Angelica built a global satellite network.
We are nearly a decade into this millennium. We have fumbled badly when it comes to the internet.
In late October Pope Benedict XVI, addressing the plenary meeting of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication, reoriented of the state of the question. He morphed the perennial image of “the public square” into a technologically current “digital continent”.
It is cliché to speak of the internet’s potential for evangelization and catechesis. But we must seriously examine what we have done and what we have failed to do in this regard. We are in a fight for our lives as Catholics in the public square. We must stop dithering.
Pope Benedict is trying to revitalize our Catholic identity so that we can have a positive influence in the world as Catholics. We have something indispensable to contribute in the public square, the digital continent. But we will have little to say, as Catholics, if we don’t know who we are and if we don’t communicate well. The burning social questions of our day require a Catholic response. Do we have something to contribute or not? How will we do it?
When I reflect on the burning questions of our day, I often approach them from the angles ad extra (considered from without) and ad intra (considered from within). The ad intra angle regards who we are as Catholics amongst ourselves, while the ad extra regards how we, as Catholics, shape the world around us and are influenced by it. Holy Church has a teaching office, given to her by Christ. Returning to our cliché, less cliché now perhaps, the internet indeed has potential for teaching ad intra (catechesis) and ad extra (evangelization).
A growing number of people today like the interactive aspects of learning on the internet. Young people learn more willingly from screens, on desks and in their hands, than they do from books. Bishops must seize their opportunity and make up for their omission regarding cable/satellite TV. A poor nun with leg braces and crutches, without their power and resources, did what they couldn’t be bothered to do.
We must move with determination into cyberspace.
Every diocese ought to have a Vicar for Online Ministry and a plan.
Catholics intuitively look for leadership from priests, to be sure, but in a special way from diocesan bishops. I have met only a handful of bishops who actually grasp that there is an internet. Few take it seriously. On the live internet stream of the November meeting of the USCCB a bishop observed that, while he appreciated reducing paper consumption by giving him a CD-ROM disk, he didn’t know how to use it. I met a prelate in Rome, working in social communications, who didn’t know how to turn on his computer. An American Cardinal quizzed me about my footprint in cyberspace and mused, “More people read you in a day than read me in a week in our newspaper.” As a new generation of bishops emerges, episcopal savvy about modern tools of communication will improve. Nevertheless, bishops can’t themselves be the point men for a diocese’s online ministry.
Vicars for Online Ministry don’t have to exert control over the Catholic internet space – as if that were possible. Rather, they should take advantage of a natural desire on the part of Catholics for official leadership in all areas of communication and education.
Dioceses have to fill in the vacuum that now exists in terms of information channeling and interpretation. They do this usually, and not always well, through “official spokesmen”.
An alternative media has its important role, but bloggers are at risk to become the sole free flowing channel of news and information both about what is going on in the Church as well as what current events mean.
If anyone doubts the universal effects of Original Sin, let him watch an intersection with a four-way stop sign for a while, or read the combox of an interactive website. You Brits have those roundabouts … but I’ll bet the analogy holds.
Since the early 90’s I have been involved in online ministry. I often feel like the Sheriff of Deadwood. When I exert myself to exercise leadership, discussion can be focused and fruitful. When I fail in leadership or charity, the results can be chaotic and disappointing. Efforts for online ministry need guidance and support.
In same address I mentioned above, Pope Benedict cited John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris missio:
“… the very evangelization of modern culture depends to a great extent on the influence of the media.” He went on: “It is not enough to use the media simply to spread the Christian message and the Church’s authentic teaching. It is also necessary to integrate that message into the ‘new culture’ created by modern communications.”
I have used this example for years now: Our Lord asked to be let out on the water in a little boat at the end of a line so that He could address a much larger crowd on the shore. He thereby gave us the first example of “on-line ministry” (cf. Mark 4). He used technology to address a wider audience.
We must contribute not merely more of the same to the digital pulse of this age. We must find ways to adjust the very frequency of that digital pulse. We need what Pope Benedict called a “‘diaconate of culture’ on today’s ‘digital continent’”.
I chuckled at that “pulse” image at the end. Back when I wrote this I still had the domain “Catholic Pulse”. Someone else has it now and good luck to them.
Since I wrote that plenty of water has flowed under the you know what. I am now more scarred and a lot wearier than I was then. I stick to what I proposed.
I will add this codicil for the bishops who read this: Don’t wait to reach out to bloggers, especially your clerical bloggers. With the exception of the fringe, they are not your enemies. Give them a little water and sunlight and see what happens. Make a move.
And remember: The squishy middle is not your best course to tack, nor will its denizens be your allies.
Life is messy, my dear readers. We make mistakes. We get get up. We go forward, living with the consequences as best we may. God sees clearly the whole truth and cannot be fooled about anything. We, on the other hand, have to struggle along, working things through as best we can in the tangle of our minds – and hearts – with the help of the authority of the Church which God graciously gave us.
From a reader:
I was married at age 22 – I was not Catholic but my husband was and we were married in the Catholic church by a priest. The marriage lasted 5 years. I went to counseling when we started having problems, but he refused to go.
The one time he did go, he just sat there and refused to participate. It felt like a one-sided marriage and so we divorced relatively amicably. I tried for several years afterward to reconcile with him, but he was not interested. When he started dating again, I rushed into a marriage to someone else out of frustration and retaliation. It was doomed from the start and when he started sleeping around on me in the first 4 months, I divorced him. Several years later I was living with a man that was Catholic and we wanted to get married and so I converted to Catholicism and started the process to get married in the Church by having my first two marriages annulled.
It took over a year for the annulments to be granted, and in the meantime we broke up. In order to finalize the annulments, I had to pay a large sum of money which I did not have, so I didn’t do anything about it. I lost faith in the Catholic church for many years and started going to a non-denominational mega church where I met and married a wonderful Protestant man. After 6 years of marriage, I came back to the Catholic church. I paid the fee to have my annulments finalized and my husband and I had our marriage convalidated by my priest. So technically I am in full communion with the church. But I still somehow think that my first marriage is still my “real” marriage and that I am still living in sin. What is your opinion?
First things first. Don’t be unduly troubled in your conscience. You followed the prescriptions of the Church’s law. It took a while, but you eventually followed them. Your current marriage is now recognized by the Church as a valid and binding sacramental marriage. Hopefully, there is evidence of grace active in your marriage. You and your spouse are growing closer to each other and closer to Christ. I hope you pray together. Keep constantly before your mind’s eye, your sacred obligation to do everything you can to get each other into heaven.
In life we often are beset by regrets and “what ifs” about our pasts. For the most part, these are temptations put in our way by Satan to confuse, to befuddle, to lead us away from our lives in the hic et nunc, the here and now. Make a regular confession and receive the Blessed Sacrament regularly. That’s the best prescription for the “what ifs”.
That said, note carefully that “for the most part”, above. Sometimes our regrets are legitimate. Deep down, only God and the individual know for certain.
Were you completely honest when providing your testimony for the marriage nullity cases? What are the reasons you still think of your first attempt at marriage as “real”? [Don’t answer that here, of course.] The staff at a marriage tribunal can only judge a case based on the evidence provided. If important evidence was withheld, some testimony unduly slanted, it is possible that an incorrect decision was made. The Church does not invest its tribunals with infallibility.
So, if after all this, you still truly plagued by doubts, the best thing to do would be to sit down with a good, experienced priest, ideally a canonist (that is, trained in canon law), though that is not a deal breaker. Say a prayer to the Holy Spirit before you meet with him. Explain your concerns, your doubts, and your thoughts. Lay it all out before him. Answer honestly the questions he may ask. Then, trust what he has to say. If he says, “Don’t worry. You’ve done everything correctly. You can rest easy in the validity of your current marriage,” then, whenever those doubts come creeping back, you can banish them with a clear conscience.
(The combox moderation queue is on.)
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A Daily Prayer for Priests
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