Communio – Page 516 – …bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Damian Thompson acknowledges that slop is all we seem to get when it comes to liturgical music

Damian Thompson’s blog entry the other day on trendy liturgical music is right on but I can only bring myself to say, no kidding. Saying that the “liturgists” have made our liturgical life a laughing-stock is correct but it’s clearly an understatement and patently too polite. In my mind the poor state of the Liturgy has driven more people away than we care to admit.

Here Thompson is relating to us the reflection (informed judgement) of James Macmillian to the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols. MacMillan is considered Britain’s “best” liturgical musician alive. His insight is nothing new and in fact doesn’t go far enough. People of reasonable intelligence and liturgical sensibility think –not feel– that the state of the Liturgy today, particularly in parishes, is rather rotten to the core. Little of the liturgical music we get today is beautiful, true and good.

Hence, I think we live with horrid agenda-driven sense of the sacred Liturgy which praises humanity more than the divinity, especially when it comes too music because we don’t know any better plus we’ve been beaten down by the ecclesiastical establishment who want no controversy. Add to this the vapid liturgical formation purported to be the mind of Vatican II and current scholarship. I’d like to hear, just once from the pastoral musician crowd, that they’ve only been serving pablum since the end of the Holy Synod in 1965. The experience of the Liturgy is more often than not off-putting and too often trite. AND we wonder why many abandon the Catholic faith.

What does the Church say about the liturgical memorial of Blessed Virgin Mary?

This most Holy Synod [Vatican II] deliberately teaches this
Catholic doctrine and at the same time admonishes all the sons of the Church
that the cult, especially the liturgical cult, of the Blessed Virgin, be
generously fostered, and the practices and exercises of piety, recommended by
the magisterium of the Church toward her in the course of centuries be made of
great moment, and those decrees, which have been given in the early days
regarding the cult of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, be
religiously observed. But it exhorts theologians and preachers of the
divine word to abstain zealously both from all gross exaggerations as well as
from petty narrow-mindedness in considering the singular dignity of the Mother
of God. Following the study of Sacred Scripture, the Holy Fathers, the
doctors and liturgy of the Church, and under the guidance of the Church’s
magisterium, let them rightly illustrate the duties and privileges of the
Blessed Virgin which always look to Christ, the source of all truth, sanctity
and piety. Let them assiduously keep away from whatever, either by word or
deed, could lead separated brethren or any other into error regarding the true
doctrine of the Church. Let the faithful remember moreover that true devotion
consists neither in sterile or transitory affection, nor in a certain vain
credulity, but proceeds from true faith, by which we are led to know the
excellence of the Mother of God, and we are moved to a filial love toward our
mother and to the imitation of her virtues. (Lumen gentium, 67)

Cashing-in the work of the Church

Are we committed to beauty and truth in art? Thinking about
Dan Brown’s books which contains Catholic “material” I have been a bit
distressed at some peoples’ an uncritical acceptance of what I think is mostly
scandalous regarding the Catholic faith. To me it is not OK because Brown is,
as it’s said belowi, cashing in on the work of the Church. But my gripe is that
fiction is always received as such by some people aren’t able to clearly
discern the meaning of things. That is, there are people who can’t separate
fact from fiction in printed materials; for them anything in print is true.
Right, it’s ludicrous but people do think that what Dan Brown writes is true
and beyond reproach. Father John Wauck, an Opus Dei priest, is a professor at
the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, and the author of the blog
“The Da Vinci Code and Opus Dei” said the following recently in an
interview the rest of the interview was published on Zenit.org.

Dan Brown’s
trying to sell books by offering a “cocktail” of history, art,
religion and mystery, and, in today’s world, there seems to be only one place
where he’s able to find all those things together: in the Roman Catholic
Church. In fact, he’s cashing in on the culture of the Church.

Universities are
an invention of the Church. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic cleric, and he
dedicated his book on the heliocentric universe to the Pope. The calendar we
use today is the Gregorian Calendar, because it was promulgated by Pope Gregory
XIII, who was working with the best astronomers and mathematicians of his time.
Galileo himself always remained a Catholic, and his two daughters were nuns.
One of the greatest Italian astronomers of the 19th century was a Jesuit
priest, Angelo Secchi. The father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, was a
Catholic monk. The creator of the “Big Bang” theory was a Belgian
priest, Georges Lemaitre.

In short, the idea that there is a some natural tension between science and the Church, between reason and faith, is utter nonsense. Nowadays, when people hear the words “science” and “the Church,” they immediately think of Galileo’s trial in the 1600s. But, in the larger scheme of things, that complex case –which is frequently distorted by anti-Catholic propagandists–was a glaring exception. There’s a reason why critics of the Church are always brings it up: It’s the only example they’ve got. So, when we hear the words “science” and “the Church,” we should think Copernicus, Secchi, Mendel and Lemaitre. They’re representative. Galileo’s trial is not.

Consider living according to the virtues of Mary, Mother of God

…true devotion to our Lady is holy, that is, it leads
us to avoid sin and to imitate the virtues of Mary. Her ten principal virtues
are: deep humility, lively faith, blind obedience, unceasing prayer, constant
self-denial, surpassing purity, ardent love, heroic patience, angelic kindness,
and heavenly wisdom.

Saint Louis-Mary de Montfort, True Devotion to the
Blessed Mother

Matteo Ricci: 4th centenary of death

We’re observing the anniversary of death of the famed Jesuit, Matteo Ricci. Benedict XVI wrote to Bishop Claudio Giuliodori of Macerata-Tolentino-Recanati-Cingoli-Treia, Italy on the occasion of a Jubilee Year commemorating the fourth centenary of the death of the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci, who died in Beijing, China on 11 May 1610. In part the Pope said:

In considering his intense academic and spiritual activity, we cannot but remain favourably impressed by the innovative and unusual skill with which he, with full respect, approached Chinese cultural and spiritual traditions. It was, in fact, this approach that characterised his mission, which aimed to seek possible harmony between the noble and millennial Chinese civilisation and the novelty of Christianity, which is for all societies a ferment of liberation and of true renewal from within, because the Gospel, universal message of salvation, is destined for all men and women whatever the cultural and religious context to which they belong.

A biography of Father Ricci can be read here.

More about Father Ricci can be found here and here.

For those with a deeper curiosity I could recommend Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.

Growing Christ requires openness to all reality

Jesuit Fathers Campbell and McMahon write in their book, Becoming a Person in the Whole Christ:

The essential foundation of our ability to become a person
lies in our ability to transcend isolation and to share ourselves as free gift
with another.

This capacity for openness to all of reality, the hallmark
of every spiritual being, is the essence of man as person, providing him with
potentialities for human growth that are unlimited. It is also the
“ground” of our capacity for religious experience, making it possible
for God to give Himself to us through a sharing in His divine life, and
ultimately in the fullness of open friendship with Him.

Pope asks priests to focus on Christ in prayer in order to serve

This paragraph from the Pope’s homily for the May 3^rd
priesthood ordinations is a good example of the Pope’s holy agenda for priests,
indeed, for all who are called to serve the Lord and His Church. As the Pope
says, this is dear to his heart…

…prayer
and its ties with service. We have seen that to be ordained priests means to
enter in a sacramental and existential way into Christ’s prayer for “his
own”. From this we priests derive a particular vocation to pray in a
strongly Christocentric sense: we are called, that is, to “remain”
in Christ as the evangelist John likes to repeat (cf. Jn 1: 35-39; 15:
4-10) and this abiding in Christ is achieved especially through prayer. Our
ministry is totally tied to this “abiding” which is equivalent to
prayer, and draws from this its efficacy. In this perspective, we must
think of the different forms of prayer of a priest, first of all daily Holy
Mass. The Eucharistic Celebration is the greatest and highest act of prayer,
and constitutes the centre and the source from which even the other forms
receive “nourishment”: the Liturgy of the Hours,
Eucharistic adoration, Lectio Divina, the Holy Rosary, meditation. All these
expressions of prayer, which have their centre in the Eucharist, fulfill the
words of Jesus in the priest’s day and in all his life: “I am the good
shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know
the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep” (Jn 10: 14-15). In fact,
this “knowing” and “being known” in Christ and, through
him, in the Most Holy Trinity, is none other than the most true and deep
reality of prayer. The priest who prays a lot, and who prays well,
is progressively drawn out of himself and evermore united to Jesus the Good
Shepherd and the Servant of the Brethren. In conforming to him, even the priest
“gives his life” for the sheep entrusted to him. No one
takes it from him: he offers it himself, in unity with Christ the Lord, who has
the power to give his life and the power to take it back not only for himself,
but also for his friends, bound to him in the Sacrament of Orders. Thus the
life of Christ, Lamb and Shepherd, is communicated to the whole flock, through
the consecrated ministers.

What does it mean to be a teacher?

What does it mean
to be a teacher in today’s educational climate? Can an adult be in an educative
relationship with a young person without risk? To be a teacher implies the
offer of a proposal that reaches the heart of the student, but this is only
possible if it is communicated by an energy that originates from the presence
of the educator.

For more info see the website.

What Christ won

Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been
given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the
present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads toward a
goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to
justify the effort of the journey. The promise of Christ is not only a reality
that we await, but a real presence. (Benedict XVI)

We speak about how things ought to be or what is not going
well and “we do not start from the affirmation that Christ has won the
victory.” To say that Christ has won, that Christ has risen, signifies that the
meaning of my life and of the world is present, already present, and time is
the profound and mysterious working of its manifestation. (Luigi Giussani)

Trusting God enough to abandon the self to Him at all costs

There are very
few men who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves
entirely to His hands, and let themselves be formed by His Grace. A thick and
shapeless tree trunk would never believe that it could become a statue, admired
as a miracle of sculpture … and would never consent to submit itself to the
chisel of the sculptor who, as St. Augustine says, sees by his genius what he
can make of it. Many people who, we see, now scarcely live as Christians, do
not understand that they could become saints, if they would let themselves be
formed by the grace of God, if they did not ruin His plans by resisting the
work which He wants to do… In this life a thing is good only in the degree in
which it serves eternal life. And it is evil in that degree in which it makes
us turn aside or away from it. In this way the soul, suffering contradictions
on this earth, enlightened and purified by the eternal dew, builds its nest on
the heights, concentrates all its desires on the search for Christ crucified
since, after being crucified in this life, it will rise to life with Him in the
next.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola to Ascanio Colonna, Rome, April 25, 1543