Category: Catholics

Vanderbilt U. loses its Catholic presence

. . . as in its official Vanderbilt Catholic organization, which has shaken the campus dust off its feet and decamped.

Vandy said it had to open officers’ ranks to non-Catholics, as it told all religious groups regarding their various affiliations.

It’s as if the Society of Midland Authors were ordered by the City of Chicago to open its leadership to talk-show hosts who never wrote a line.

Which may happen some day if radio talkers ever get organized and swing prevailing opinion in a talking-over-writing direction.

Even liberals would oppose that one.

H/T: The Blaze and Nashville Tennessean

“Danny Boy” at church

Coulda knocked me over with a vigil light last night at the start of our Lenten reconciliation service when the first hymn was “Danny Boy” — the tune, that is.  The lyrics, by the prolific Dottie Rambo, began:

Amazing grace shall always be my song of praise./ For it was grace that bought my liberty;/ I do not know just why He came to love me so,/ He looked beyond my fault and saw my need.”

Etc.  Phew.

“Amazing grace” is our “song of praise.”  Make of that what you will.

At the usual point, I hunched up my shoulders somehow to react sympathetically to that Danny Boy high note:

At “there” in the immortal line:

‘Tis I’ll be there in sunshine or in shadow

At “bend” in this one:

For you will bend and tell me that you love me.

And last night at the second syllable of “marvelous” in this line:

How marvelous the grace that caught my falling soul.

My devotion knew no bounds.

Resisting Catholicism

This fellow, a writer living in Italy, tells here a funny, irreverent, sad story in which he bemoans Italians and the pressure he is put under to become Catholic. 

But I have to, at least would like to, think he’s in a process of discovery and, frankly, would welcome more from him in this vein.  He asks good questions, for one thing.

There’s a lot of this going on, this Catholic awareness expressed by writers.  Aren’t things Catholic being discussed a lot?

Who’s in charge church-wise? Anyone?

In a letter to the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, The Mass belongs to the Church, not the priest, I take exception to the publisher’s taking vigorous exception to a bishop’s enforcing liturgical rules.

[Bishop Edward] Braxton [of Belleville IL] had no choice. Once apprised of the situation, he nixed the practice. What was he supposed to do, poll the congregation?  . . . .

[A] priest wants to remake the Mass, the center of Catholic worship? Braxton is supposed to say go ahead, suit yourself? If he has authority in any area, it’s in worship.

Unless you don’t like authority in the first place, or at least not in the church.

Goal for preacher: less preaching (time)

Last night ashes at 7 pm mass.  Priest blesses them on the spot, which I do not remember from other years.  So freshly blessed ashes on one’s forehead.  I got mine at a noon Liturgy of the Word at another parish, where the pastor said the old line, Remember (not man, he knows me and said Jim), you are dust and to dust you shall return.  Far better than years ago at Old St. Pat’s west of the Loop, where the lady said something akin to Have a nice day, whatever she said, it said nothing about my returning to dust some day, as if let’s not think about that, if you don’t mind.

At our church the priest, who also knows me and I him, lo these 62 years, said a few words at sermon time.  He gave a sermon, that is, but shorter than usual because he had ashes to bless and paste on foreheads.  I can’t tell you the relief I felt when he finished in one-third the time or the usual, and he’s a very good preacher!

What if sermons were in general half the usual length?  Would they be twice as effective?  Assuming the roughly twice the time put into preparation to make the point clear and punchy in the shorter time, yes.

Why assume twice the preparation for half the time preaching?  Well, the old, oft told story of the preacher asked how long it would take to be ready to preach, beginning with a very short sermon and moving to the very long one, saying he needed lots of time and less as the length lessened, until finally given no time limit and announcing, “I’m ready right now!”

So what about it?  Sermons so well constructed they take half the usual time?  (Good idea, Jim!)

Mandate rubs Catholics’ noses in it. Yuck.

Responded last week to especially provocative local-paper column about the HHS mandate, “Who controls birth control?”  But no letters in the paper this week.  Thin paper and all.  A pity, that.  Here’s my letter, which addresses some more than parochial concerns:

2/17/2012 3:54:03 PM

Editor:

Ken Trainor, my excellent editor for many months of Wednesday Journal columns, laid an egg in his Feb. 14 column about the HHS mandate, ignoring the governmental intrusion-coercion factor in favor of lambasting bishops.

In so doing, he soared over the top, even for this sometime critic.  The bishops were “beside themselves with outrage” over the mandate.  They “thundered,” calling the issue “a matter of religious liberty!”  It’s time for them “to grow up.”

Plus, he makes a bit much of the “people of God” argument, as if the Vatican Council meant to dismantle or otherwise negate the church’s entire governing structure.  Where’d he get that idea?

Basically, he wants a referendum about what’s sin and what isn’t, something not even the pace-setting reformer Martin Luther had in mind.

Failing that, he wants bishops to shut up about some things, which is apparently what the feds want also and have hefty fines in store if they don’t.  Refusal to participate has an estimated $10 million a year fine for an institution the size of Notre Dame, for instance.  Not even the bishops have that kind of power.

The whole thing is really a rubbing of Catholics’ noses in the weltanschaung, a German word for the whole damn contemporary dumb view of things.  Ken doesn’t mind, because he stepped in it and can’t get himself out.

Before I go, one of Ken’s arguments has me fascinated.  It’s this: “The hierarchy doesn’t like the U.S. government telling them what to do. The Catholic laity . . . has refused to allow the hierarchy to tell them what to do.  What works for the hierarchy, . . . works for the [laity].”  Which I find as mysterious as a papal encyclical.  Can’t a good editor do better than that?

— Jim Bowman