Recently, the Catholic Herald published two excellent articles by the incredibly well-educated and well-formed Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, entitled “Rebuilding Catholic Culture.”
In these essays, Sister Roccasalvo vigorously defends the teachings of the popes and the Second Vatican Council concerning what music is proper for use during the sacred liturgies of the Church, while simultaneously arguing against the use of modern folk-style music commonly found in many parishes.
As Christians we believe that Jesus Christ is the God who created us, the sacrificial victim who redeemed us, our judge, and our eternal destiny.
We learn from Christ and His Church that we are all children of God, each with equal value in God‘s eyes, and each sharing God’s love. The concept of human equality is a particularly Christian concept.
The articles and letters published in the Catholic Herald this past month show that people value quality liturgical music and have strong convictions about it.
This is encouraging to me, and our Year of Faith theme (Evangelization through Beauty) provides an excellent background for a fruitful discussion. I also am eager for this discussion because I have devoted my entire life to Church music. As we move forward, I would like to make the following observations.
When the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became incarnate on earth, in Jesus Christ, He became the most perfect Way that the God could communicate with us humans.
God had communicated since the creation of human beings. God did this, first of all, through nature: human beings could simply look on the greatness of the natural world about them and be led to the knowledge of God.
Most Americans are familiar with New Year’s resolutions; many embrace them with enthusiasm for the first two weeks of January each year. As winter trudges on, those resolutions lose some of their fervor. Almost all Catholics are familiar with the practice of fasting from things they enjoy each Lent; the good majority stay strong throughout those 40 days.
Based on the success rates of keeping resolutions, it seems like the better and more serious a reason to make one in the first place, the more enthusiasm and effort is put forth in keeping it.
As this Year of Faith began in early October, the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in his opening homily spoke of a “desertification” happening throughout the world. Many people have found themselves drifting away from the practice of the faith, putting stake in the world’s definition of happiness and no longer desiring the beautiful.
I will never forget the events surrounding the first time I attended the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
Six months earlier I had taken a position as the director of religious education in a small rural community just outside of Canton, Ohio. I was armed with a new master’s degree in theology and all the hope in the world that all Catholics could fall deeply in love with God and the Church.
Early one morning I received a call from a friend, a professor at the college down the road and the moderator for the campus pro-life group. He called begging me to drive a group of college students to the March for Life in D.C. My immediate response was, “Are you crazy?” In Ohio, it is only a six-hour drive to our nation’s capital, but I wasn’t prepared to go to march for so many reasons.
World Mission Sunday, organized by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, is a day set aside for Catholics worldwide to recommit themselves to the Church’s missionary activity through prayer and sacrifice. In 2012, World Mission Sunday is celebrated on October 21.
Annually, World Mission Sunday is celebrated on the next-to-last Sunday in October.
On Thursday of this week (October 11), the Church will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and the 20th Anniversary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s promulgation with the initiation of a very special Year of Faith.
In his apostolic letter Porta Fidei, Pope Benedict XVI called for this special year —which will conclude on November 24, 2013 — with the primary aim “to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the faith in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope.” He also intends this year to be “a good opportunity to intensify the celebration of the faith in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharist,” and to “intensify the witness of charity.”
As the faithful enter this Year of Faith, they will be called to give witness to their faith more and more. In Porta Fidei, Pope Benedict wrote, “faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received and when it is communicated as an experience of grace and joy.”
In a time when the virality of a message and success in communications is often measured by the number of views a video gets on YouTube and how many times an article is shared on Facebook, it makes sense that Catholics would feel like their message and witness is not easily or rapidly spread through the world today.
Mother Church Rejoices! With his typically optimistic words, Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962. Today, we share that same joy as we commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Council that Pope John frequently referred to as “a new Pentecost.”
The first document issued by the Council was the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. It was one of only four Constitutions (which are of the highest rank of Church teachings) issued by the Council. The goals of the entire Council are laid out in the first paragraph: to increase the vigor of people’s Christian life, to adapt those things which may be changed to the needs of our own times, to promote Christian unity, and to help all people come to know Christ in the Church.
