Monday, March 18, 2024

Why are the U.S. bishops downplaying a paradigm of Christianity?

A Paschal Mystery

Why are the U.S. bishops downplaying a paradigm of Christianity?
Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection, 1463 (RealyEasyStar/Claudio Pagliarani/Alamy Stock Photo)

When the American bishops produced their multi-year plan for a National Eucharistic Revival in 2022, there was only one passing reference to the concept of the Paschal Mystery in their founding statement. I was dumbfounded. Only one! I’ve been wondering ever since why they would abandon the language and concept of Paschal Mystery, and I think I’ve finally figured it out. They must have concluded that it wouldn’t serve their purpose, which was a return to the Eucharistic piety that predated the Second Vatican Council.

The prominence of the Paschal Mystery is one of the hallmarks of Vatican II, and it has not diminished in importance since that time. Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on the fruits of the Second Vatican Council in a 2013 address to the clergy of Rome, remarked: 

There were several of these: above all, the Paschal Mystery as the center of what it is to be Christian—and therefore of the Christian life, the Christian year, the Christian seasons, expressed in Eastertide and on Sunday which is always the day of the Resurrection. Again and again we begin our time with the Resurrection, our encounter with the Risen one, and from that encounter with the Risen one we go out into the world.

Congregations seek ways to turn empty convents into new ministries

 

Congregations seek ways to turn empty convents into new ministries

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Dorothy Day’s ‘Letter to an Agnostic’

 

Dorothy DayMarch 14, 2024

Dorothy Day in a 1935 file photo. (CNS photo courtesy Marquette University Archives)

Editor's note: This essay was first published in America on Aug. 4, 1934.

Reading the eighth chapter of St. Teresa’s autobiography recalled to me your objection to religion as being morbid.

This is quite a natural feeling on your part and it is a very common attitude toward religion. If those who spend several hours a day in prayer, and hours more in spiritual reading, as she did, in a wilful search for God, had these feelings, these struggles—how much more those who are scarcely touched by faith or hope?

You know the reaction of my friends to religion, that it is a deliberate turning away from life. We Catholics know, with a supernatural knowledge, not with a worldly knowledge, that this is not so, just as we know the existence of God and love Him with our will, which is a power of our souls?

St. Teresa struggled for twenty years, she said, to avoid the occasions of sin. To know what she was talking about, what she meant by sin, it is necessary to understand the situation she was in.

LENT PROPELS US TO EASTER

 

LENT PROPELS US TO EASTER

Easter is still a few weeks away. We find ourselves muddling through the doldrums of Lent. But I want to make a bold claim: Now is the time to begin our Easter story.


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VATICAN PUTS THE BRAKES ON SYNOD ON SYNODALITY, PUSHES ‘CONTROVERSIAL’ TOPICS TO 2025

 

VATICAN PUTS THE BRAKES ON SYNOD ON SYNODALITY, PUSHES ‘CONTROVERSIAL’ TOPICS TO 2025

Women deacons, priestly formation and other contentious questions won’t be a part of the next synod in October.


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Saturday, March 16, 2024

Why you should write a psalm of your own

 

Father James Martin: How I fell in love with Ireland


James Martin, S.J.March 14, 2024  America

A statue of St. Patrick is seen on Croagh Patrick, the mountain where, according to tradition, St. Patrick spent 40 days in prayer and fasting. (Credit: James Martin, S.J.)

I’m half Irish—and proud of it. But I have never been what some of my friends call “professionally Irish,” the kind of Irish-American who knows all the verses of “The Fields of Athenry,” knows the best pub in their ancestral village and can recite the names of all the counties by heart. My dad was Irish (his grandfather emigrated from County Wexford), but he wore it lightly, except on St. Patrick’s Day, when my Sicilian-heritage mother would make spaghetti and meatballs while he feigned outrage, which my sister and I found hilarious.

The first time I visited Ireland was in 2018 for the Vatican’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin, to speak about L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics. I was nervous about the talk (this was the first time that anyone had ever spoken about the topic at the event, and protests were expected), but all went well and my hosts were exceedingly welcoming. I was even able to visit a few Jesuit churches and communities. But it was a brief trip and I didn’t get to know Dublin, much less Ireland. Where was Wexford, anyway?

Conversations with young adults are cause for hope

 The Synod as Starting Point

Conversations with young adults are cause for hope
Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez joins young adults at a synodal listening session at La Salle University (OSV News photo/CNS file, Sarah Webb, CatholicPhilly.com).

Disappointment, dismay, and disillusionment were in the air following the release of the synthesis report of the Synod on Synodality’s October 2023 session. Many had high hopes for what the gathering might produce. Yet many came away with expectations unmet.

But there’s likely greater reason for optimism than what can be gleaned from a forty-page report. Church history has shown how the movement of the Spirit can linger long beyond the moment a council’s words hit the page. We have already seen new developments in the short time since the closing of last fall’s session, like the release of Fiducia supplicans, the papal document on blessings. And we still have the concluding session of the Synod coming this fall. This leads me to believe that we shouldn’t focus on immediate change—but rather on the possibilities the synod promises for tomorrow.