This bishop, of Bend Oregon, gets the award for Getting It. May Our Lord richly reward him with greater understanding and years in leading his flock.

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To understand liturgical changes, study meaning of liturgy

By Bishop Robert Vasa

BEND — I wrote very briefly last week about the presentation at our presbyteral assembly on the upcoming revised translation of the Roman Missal and I want to reflect a bit more on this topic. It will undoubtedly be a bit difficult for some to accept with peace and tranquility the changes and amendments which are forthcoming for the Sacred Liturgy. The possibility that there may be some difficulty understanding and accepting the changes is understandable. Unfortunately, it can often happen that the reason why we anticipate such a difficulty has less to do with the Sacred Liturgy than it does with our own attitudes. It will indeed be the case that the Church in approving changes to the texts for the Sacred Liturgy will also be asking that we change. In looking at myself, I must admit that I am much less affected by the fact that the sacred language may change than I am by the fact that this change affects me and perhaps, in some ways, also challenges me. [Unlike the inveterate enemy of Rome’s norms for translation, Bp. Trautman, Bp. Vasa seems to have no problem with the idea that sacred language is used in the sacred liturgy.]

If there is one factor for the laity, in my estimation, which will impact on the ease with which changes are accepted or the strength with which they are resisted it is our fundamental understanding of the nature and purpose of the Sacred Liturgy. The frequency with which comments are heard such as, “I really like Father X’s Mass,” or “I find it very difficult to go to Father Y’s Mass,” or “That Mass did not do anything for me,” or the most common, “I don’t get anything out of the Mass” are all indicators of a certain understanding of the nature and purpose of the Sacred Liturgy. Underlying these comments, and many more variations thereof, is a certain concept of the liturgy. The proposed changes present us an opportunity to reflect, even in a significantly self critical way, on our understanding, or misunderstanding, of the meaning and purpose of the Sacred Liturgy. [Hear hear!]

In order to begin to reform or reshape our understanding of the Sacred Liturgy we need to go to the Church and to the catechism which she has given us. There we read and hear that: “Sunday is the pre-eminent day for the liturgical assembly, when the faithful gather ‘to listen to the word of God and take part in the Eucharist, thus calling to mind the Passion, Resurrection, and glory of the Lord Jesus, and giving thanks to God who ‘has begotten them again, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ unto a living hope.’” (CCC, 1167) Admittedly, the paragraph addresses the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass rather than Liturgy as a whole but the paragraph is instructive. On Sunday, when we gather for Mass, we do so to listen to the Word of God. While there are a number of other ceremonies which accompany the Liturgy of the Word, the reason we gather is to “listen to the Word of God.” [Attention:] There is thus an importance placed on what God gives to us, His Word. We gather to hear it. We also gather to “take part in the Eucharist.” This involves much more than simply being present and receiving Holy Communion. Centrally, it involves “calling to mind the Passion, Resurrection and glory of the Lord Jesus” and giving thanks to God for the salvation which Jesus has won for us.

These are participatory activities which include everyone without exception. Thus it is not only the reader or the servers or the extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion who participate in the Mass but rather everyone is able to fulfill the mandate of the council about “full, active and conscious participation.” This is so because an essential part of the “activity” is listening, offering, remembering, rejoicing, thanking. [NB:] These are all interior actions. [INTERIOR!] Without a doubt the participation also includes responding, singing, standing, kneeling, et cetera but these are to be external manifestations of the fact that we are participating interiorly because simply doing these things is not necessarily the same thing as actively participating. [It is nice to read what a BISHOP writes about this.]

“The Eucharist is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life.’ The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch. The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Finally, by the eucharistic celebration we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all. In brief, the Eucharist is the sum and summary of our faith: Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.” (CCC 1324-27)

I am particularly struck by the reminder that the Eucharist is the culmination of “God’s action sanctifying the world.” This is what we are called to participate in and belong to when we come to Holy Mass. It is, at the same time, the culmination of the “worship men offer to Christ.” I like to think of our participation in worship as being drawn up into the saving actions of God, being a part of them, remembering and experiencing them and coming away from them knowing that we have been in contact with Him Who is all holy. Ideally, the Eucharist changes us because we celebrate who God is and what he has done and is doing in our midst. As the catechism notes, “Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist,” not vice versa.

The proposed linguistic enrichments of the Sacred Liturgy, or if you prefer, changes, give us the opportunity to reflect upon the Eucharist anew. They certainly give us the opportunity to listen with new ears to new language, to refresh our interior and reflective participation, and to enter more consciously into that which God is doing. If necessary, it provides the occasion for each of us to align our understanding and expectation of the Holy Mysteries more closely with the vision of the Church expressed in the Catechism.

(DE PROFUNDIS)

V. Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.
R. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
V. If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe iniquities; Lord, who shall endure it?
R. For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness:
V. and by reason of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord.
R. My soul hath relied on His word; my soul hath hoped in the Lord.
V. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.
R. Because with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him plentiful redemption.
V. And He shall redeem Israel from all her iniquities.

V. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,
R. and let perpetual light shine upon them.

(Responsory Prayer for the Dead)

V. Do not remember my sins O Lord,
R. When you come to judge the world by fire
V. Direct my ways in your sight, O Lord, my God
R. When you come to judge the world by fire
V. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
R. When you come to judge the world by fire
V. Lord, have mercy
R. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy
V. Our Father in heaven, hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
R. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
V. From the gates of Hell.
R. Deliver their souls, O Lord.
V. May they rest in peace
R. Amen
V. Lord hear my prayer
R. And let my cry come to you.

V. Let us pray.

V. O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful,
grant to the souls of Thy servants departed the remission of all their sins, that through our pious supplication they may obtain that pardon which they have always desired; who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

PRAYER FOR A DECEASED PRIEST

ALL: O God, Thou didst raise Thy servants to the sacred priesthood of Jesus Christ, according to the Order of Melchisedech, giving them the sublime power to offer the Eternal Sacrifice, to bring the Body and Blood of Thy Son Jesus Christ down upon the altar, and to absolve the sins of men in Thine own Holy Name. We beseech Thee to reward their faithfulness and to forget their faults, admitting them speedily into Thy Holy Presence, there to enjoy forever the recompense of their labors. This we ask through Jesus Christ Thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

Pray for the souls of priests.

First, remember that you can gain indulgences on All Souls and the days following.

Secondly, November 5th is a first Thursday. You can gain a plenary indulgence during this year for Priests.

Third, would it not be a good idea in this Year for Priests, during the week after All Souls, for this 1st Thursday, to pray in a special way for the souls of deceased priests?

May I recommend that you bring this up with your parish priests, who might make pulpit announcements this Sunday?

If you are a blogger, would you post something on this?

Would you recommend this to your prayer groups, friends and family?

Who would have thought that the USCCB (otherwise known as the Democrat Party at Prayer) would take this step?

Extracted from the Creative Minority Report:

This is big news. For months the bishops have been threatening to oppose the healthcare legislation as long as it included abortion funding. But, who would have expected this?

Wonderful news. Catholic.org reports:

An E-mail directive has been sent from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Pro-Life Activities Secretariat mobilizing every parish in the United States of America. It contains an urgent message which is to be distributed in every parish this weekend and announced at every single Mass. This massive and urgent appeal may be unprecedented in our history as Catholics in America. It is an effort to mobilize the Catholic faithful on an urgent matter of public policy concerning the fundamental and foundational human right to life.

The E-Mail specifically asks that no parish opt out of this initiative.


The bishops are urging all parishes to insert a document into all parish bulletins across the country. The pdf of the file is here. Print it out. Give it to your pastor if it's not in the bulletin. Pass it out. Make it known!



The text reads:USCCB NATIONWIDE BULLETIN INSERT

Tell Congress: Remove Abortion Funding & Mandates from Needed Health Care Reform

Congress is preparing to debate health care reform legislation on the House and Senate floors.

Genuine health care reform should protect the life and dignity of all people from the moment of conception until natural death. The U.S. bishops’ conference has concluded that all committee approved bills are seriously deficient on the issues of abortion and conscience, and do not provide adequate access to health care for immigrants and the poor. The bills will have to change or the bishops have pledged to oppose them.

Our nation is at a crossroads. Policies adopted in health care reform will have an impact for good or ill for years to come. None of the bills retains longstanding current policies against abortion funding or abortion coverage mandates, and none fully protects conscience rights in health care.

As the U.S. bishops’ letter of October 8 states:

“No one should be required to pay for or participate in abortion. It is essential that the legislation clearly apply to this new program longstanding and widely supported federal restrictions on abortion funding and mandates, and protections for rights of conscience.

No current bill meets this test…. If acceptable language in these areas cannot be found, we will have to oppose the health care bill vigorously.”

For the full text of this letter and more information on proposed legislation and the bishops’ advocacy for authentic health care reform, visit: www.usccb.org/healthcare.

Congressional leaders are attempting to put together final bills for floor consideration. Please contact your Representative and Senators today and urge them to fix these bills with the pro-life amendments noted below. Otherwise much needed health care reform will have to be opposed. Health care reform should be about saving lives, not destroying them.

ACTION: Contact Members through e-mail, phone calls or FAX letters.
-- To send a pre-written, instant e-mail to Congress go to www.usccb.org/action.
-- Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at: 202-224-3121, or call your Members’ local offices.
-- Full contact info can be found on Members’ web sites at www.house.gov & www.senate.gov.

MESSAGE to SENATE:
“During floor debate on the health care reform bill, please support an amendment to incorporate longstanding policies against abortion funding and in favor of conscience rights.

If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.”

MESSAGE to HOUSE: “Please support the Stupak Amendment that addresses essential pro-life concerns on abortion funding and conscience rights in the health care reform bill. Help ensure that the Rule for the bill allows a vote on this amendment. If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.”

WHEN: Both House and Senate are preparing for floor votes now. Act today! Thank you!

There's a lot more at Catholic.org

Update: It'll be interesting to see how this might affect the vote of some Catholic Senators who ran on a pro-life platform like Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Jr. I just called Senator Casey's D.C. office but nobody answered the phone. The message said it's due to "extremely high call volume." Ha. Good.

Update II: Jack Smith at Catholic Key has lots of info on this as well.

The following article was submitted in a slightly shorter form to the New York Times as an op-ed article. The Times declined to publish it [No surprise there, right?]. I thought you might be interested in reading it.


FOUL BALL!
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York

October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism.

It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:


* On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

* On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.

* Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.

* Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday. Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.