Catholic Sensibility

Too often westerners, especially Americans speak of rights. The flip side to this is the reality of duty and responsibility. Both are needed.

The Holy Father speaks of the right of every person to hear the Gospel:

57. Like Christ during the time of His preaching, like the Twelve on the morning of Pentecost, the Church too sees before her an immense multitude of people who need the Gospel and have a right to it, for God “wants everyone to be saved and reach full knowledge of the truth.”[1 Tim 2:4]

He also speaks of the duty of the entire Church to preach it:

The Church is deeply aware of her duty to preach salvation to all. Knowing that the Gospel message is not reserved to a small group of the initiated, the privileged or the elect, but is destined for everyone, she shares Christ’s anguish at the sight of the wandering and exhausted crowds, “like sheep without a shepherd” and she often repeats His words: ”I feel sorry for all these people.”[Mt 9:36; 15:32] But the Church is also conscious of the fact that, if the preaching of the Gospel is to be effective, she must address her message to the heart of the multitudes, to communities of the faithful whose action can and must reach others.

Christianity is not a clique, or an enclave. The notion of a smaller, purer church goes against the very fabric of Christian duty. It might be that some of the people who receive preaching, baptism, and all are less than optimal in their words and actions. It doesn’t negate the Great Commission. Pope Paul VI doesn’t deny the need to care for the multitudes, those who are responsible for living the Christian life. Note the message is not for the mind, but for the heart. I would take that as less a kerygma aimed at emotions (affairs of the heart), and more a proclamation to the very core of human life (the innermost recesses).

Comments?

Falsification is the principle by which a person tests her or his ideas for possible flaws. In a nutshell, a person considers a plan and then reflects on the possibilities that might derail the effort. Good scientists engage in it. A hypothesis is forwarded, and the researcher considers ways in which a theory can be proved wrong. It strikes me as a rational and orderly approach to the principle “What can go wrong, will go wrong.” Pessimism or pragmatism? Either way, it’s at the core of skilled scientific inquiry.

Something caught my attention in this month’s issue of Chess Life: Andy Soltis’ regular column “Chess To Enjoy.” In it, he looks at the difficult and complex relationship between optimism, worry, and success at the chessboard. In probing the idea of worry, he cites a 2004 study by Michelle Cowley and Ruth Byrne. In this research a group of chessplayers of varying abilities were tested, from average tournament players to the master level, and even a grandmaster. They were given various chess positions and asked to think “out loud” as they analyzed the situation and tried to find the best move.

Top players would find a candidate move, then spend considerable time searching for ways in which the opponent could counter. Players below master level routinely engaged in confirmation bias. When they found a move they loved, they would look for affirmation, then play it. Great chessplayers are thought to be far-thinking in their calculating processes. And the Cowley-Byrne research confirmed this. But more striking to psychologists was the content of the extended calculations. Masters underestimate their candidate move, presume the best of an opponent, and look for flaws in their idea. Amateurs are overconfident, grow attached to their good ideas, and look not so much to the best of what an opponent can deliver to counter their efforts.

Some observations …

In more than a decade online, I have to say that the internet is full of amateurs. People who have good ideas, and who trot them out there with the highest hopes. Often, issues are quickly muddied up, even if they’re citing good authorities. It’s the confirmation bias of chessplayers below the level of master. They don’t test their ideas in the crucible of critical thinking. Things have probably worsened for people who just hang with like-minded allies. Their arguments don’t get poked, probed, and pushed back.

I could use more falsification in my ministry. We’re just starting to revise Communion ministry procedure at the altar in my parish, for a possible implementation after we return to the church and when the pastor comes back from his leave. Lots of things have been suggested, and in one particular suggestion to get the chalices in the hands of the lay Communion ministers more expediently, I take the role of the pessimist. What can go wrong with this procedure? What is the likeliest way for people to mess it up? If it strays too far from old practice, what will I do with the dozen to twenty people our of ninety who never read updates, won’t attend a review session, or who have been doing it for so long they can’t break old habits without great difficulty?

Have I inherited this pessimism from my chessplaying days? Or 25 years of parish ministry? Not as much as would like.

At any rate, it’s a good spur to examine some aspects of my life. What are my presumptions? About parenting, personal finances, hobbies, and even blogging? Is there anything I’m doing that I think is a good idea, but that maybe isn’t? This is one reason I value my wife and our relationship. Being rather different in many personality aspects, we negate the tendency for confirmation bias in one another. We have unity on the essentials: love, respect, faith. We challenge one another on important things: parenting, finances, lifestyle choices. It works better because we’re not the same, because we disagree, and I count my blessings for being a better person and that I don’t have an echo chamber going along with every good notion that pops into my head.

Our bishops, alas, do not enjoy this grace. The higher one goes in the church hierarchy, the more one senses that confirmation bias rules the day. Minds and hearts and spirits are like those chess amateurs. They find a good move. They believe in it. They look around them for confirmation. They don’t think of the negative consequences, and they don’t seem to test things morally, intellectually, theologically.

People don’t consider it a big priority, but it is part of the Church’s tradition:

§ 115 § The Liturgy of the Hours is the public, daily prayer of the Church. Recognizing the importance of the Liturgy of the Hours in the life of the Church,(GILH 20) many parishes are rediscovering the spiritual beauty of the Hours and are including Morning or Evening Prayer in their daily liturgical life. Although there are no specific spatial requirements for the celebration of the Hours, the focal points of the celebration are the word of God and the praying assembly. An area of flexible seating can facilitate the prayer of a smaller group divided into alternating choirs. The importance of music in public celebrations of the Hours suggests that the place designated for their celebration should provide access to necessary equipment for musicians, particularly cantors and instrumentalists who accompany the singing community.

Seating and music are key considerations. I like the emphasis on a “singing” community. It would be nice if it were more than a “smaller community,” but one has to start somewhere.

All texts from Built of Living Stones are copyright © 2000, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The “new evangelization” seems focused on this other “sphere.” What Pope Paul VI said about it almost four decades ago:

56. The second sphere is that of those who do not practice. Today there is a very large number of baptized people who for the most part have not formally renounced their Baptism but who are entirely indifferent to it and not living in accordance with it. The phenomenon of the non practicing is a very ancient one in the history of Christianity; it is the result of a natural weakness, a profound inconsistency which we unfortunately bear deep within us. Today however it shows certain new characteristics. It is often the result of the uprooting typical of our time. It also springs from the fact that Christians live in close proximity with non-believers and constantly experience the effects of unbelief. Furthermore, the non-practicing Christians of today, more so than those of previous periods, seek to explain and justify their position in the name of an interior religion, of personal independence or authenticity.

I’m not convinced these characteristics are all that new. While it is true that people other than aristocrats have the means and freedom to be mobile these days, in previous eras, it was not unknown that wars would force whole elements of populations into the status of refugees. Did pogroms and other persecutions dilute Judaism over the centuries into irrelevance?

Church history is also full of success stories of missionaries working with whole populations resistant to Christ. Was St Patrick at a competitive disadvantage for attempting to convert an island of pagans? And it must be conceded that many Catholics have exuded qualities of interiority and independence in a search for authenticity–or more accurately, a search for the Living God.

Perhaps the erosion from a near one-hundred percent Christian veneer to ninety or eighty is insufferable to some Christians. I suspect some saints would chuckle at the “disadvantage” we face in fractional impurities. And given relentless human weakness and inconsistency, I suspect that unchristian witness has always found its way into even the highest and supposedly purest realms of earthly religion.

Thus we have atheists and unbelievers on the one side and those who do not practice on the other, and both groups put up a considerable resistance to evangelization. The resistance of the former takes the form of a certain refusal and an inability to grasp the new order of things, the new meaning of the world, of life and of history; such is not possible if one does not start from a divine absolute. The resistance of the second group takes the form of inertia and the slightly hostile attitude of the person who feels that he is one of the homily, who claims to know it all and to have tried it all and who no longer believes it.

The “new evangelization” will not be easy. The difficulties is presents are much more subtle than the opposition Christians face, say, in Muslim lands. Inertia and hostility? These happen in close human associations: families and workplaces come to mind. The solution? Forging relationships. Seeking reconciliation. Admitting fault. These would be among the “proper means and language” mentioned below.

Atheistic secularism and the absence of religious practice are found among adults and among the young, among the leaders of society and among the ordinary people, at all levels of education, and in both the old Churches and the young ones. The Church’s evangelizing action cannot ignore these two worlds, nor must it come to a standstill when faced with them; it must constantly seek the proper means and language for presenting, or representing, to them God’s revelation and faith in Jesus Christ.

Relationships. Authentic relationships with people–not the kind of stuff you can forge through theology or the new media so much. If the “new evangelization” gets bogged down in apologetics and information, I see a crash-and-burn in the future.

I see David Gibson’s piece on Father Frank, freed. Entertaining, if not informative, are the comments. Including:

Yes, we need Father Corapi back, and now Father (Groeschel) as well back on EWTN to be running full speed ahead!!!!!!!!!

I guess Bishop Zurek has learned his lesson well. Endure a few months of anger from some political pro-lifers, witness a Vatican clap on the back for the crusader, then jettison the dude like when you find a chip of a shell in that mouthful of Oysters Rockefeller.

Are there any Catholics left in Dinesh D’Souza’s court? What do you think about his explanation on post-Catholic post-marriage relationship ventures?

I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings.  Obviously I would not have introduced Denise as my fiancé at a Christian apologetics conference if I had thought or known I was doing  something wrong. But as a result of all this, and to avoid even the appearance  of impropriety, Denise and I have decided to suspend our engagement.

Okay. In some Christian circles it is considered wrong to be married after being divorced. It can be considered a breach of propriety to appear at the same early morning hour with one’s love interest, even with separate sleeping arrangements.

Do celebrities like this think they get a pass on relationship proprieties or on obedience to a bishop just because they have a Big Cause that needs winning? We’ve had nine previous presidential elections since Roe v Wade, and despite the GOP winning five of those, we’re still not really pedalling back on abortion to the political pro-lifers’ standards. Every movie needs a 1000% return on investment, too. The money has to keep rolling in somehow. Part of the blindness of the cult of celebrity is that one grows to believe the rules are made for other people, not oneself. No profit is too big. No number of fetuses is too small.

It shows the value of surrounding yourself with upright, trusty, and sound people who can disagree with you and call youout when you need a reality check.

This certainly isn’t to say that I or other liberals haven’t transgressed in the area of propriety and moral behavior. The difference is that I don’t make a living calling out my ideological opposites as bad people because of what they do. Their comboxes are very amusing, especially during a moral stumble. Let’s just say that orthodoxy is absolutely no guarantee of virtue.

Now … I need to add a few Republicans to my parish’s liturgy commission.

Some parishes celebrate dozens of funerals each year. It makes sense to ensure that the church building is well-designed for those liturgies.

§ 110 § The Order of Christian Funerals mark the final stage of the journey begun by the Christian in baptism. The structure of the current rites dates back to “Christian Rome where there were three ‘stages’ or ‘stations’ [during the funeral rite] joined by two processions”: the first from the home of the deceased to the church and the second from the church to the place of burial.(Order of Christian Funerals (OCF) 42) While the current rite preserves the procession to the church by the mourners who accompany the deceased, a funeral cortege of automobiles is more common than a procession on foot in most places in the United States.

§ 111 § Because the faith journey of the deceased began in baptism, it is appropriate that there be a physical association between the baptismal font and the space for the funeral ritual. “In the act of receiving the body, the members of the community acknowledge the deceased as one of their own, as one who was welcomed in baptism and who held a place in the assembly.”(OCF 131) With the baptismal symbols of water, light, and the pall, the mourning community prepares for the “liturgy in which it asks for a share in the heavenly banquet promised to the deceased and to all who have been [baptized in Christ].”(OCF 131)

The association with the font and funeral ritual is well-considered. Water, candles, and cloth are fine and rich symbols. Considering a font proximate to the church entrance may be tipped when one considers the importance of receiving the body, not just celebrating a Mass surrounding it.

§ 112 § In designing the seating configuration, parishes will want to consider the size and placement of the casket and the paschal candle during funerals as well as the presence of the cremated remains when cremation has taken place before the funeral Mass. Good planning will ensure that doors and aisles are wide enough for pall bearers to carry a coffin easily.

Most new churches provide for BLS 112. I don’t know about the neo-preconciliar efforts so much.

§ 113 § The permission to celebrate the funeral Mass in the presence of the cremated remains necessitates a dignified place on which the remains can rest during the Mass.(OCF appendix 2)To avoid ritual use of makeshift carriers or other inappropriate containers, parishes may wish to obtain a well designed urn or ceremonial vessel and stand to hold the cremated remains during the vigil and funeral.

Most funeral homes provide nice (and expensive) containers. But the parish acquisition of a vessel and stand is well worth consideration.

§ 114 § The funeral rites permit the celebration of the vigil for the deceased in the church.(OCF 55) If this is the practice, it is appropriate to wake the body in the baptistry or gathering area or in another dignified area of the church that will not interfere with the normal liturgical life of the parish.

Show of hands: how many celebrate vigils and wake the body in some part of the church?

All texts from Built of Living Stones are copyright © 2000, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

I’m going to begin with what’s good about Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312. Ideas. Not all are original to the author, but that makes them no less awe-inspiring.

On Mercury, close to a half million people live in a mobile city that stays just in the shadow of the sun. How? It rolls on tracks around the planet.

On Venus, a shield in space blocks the sun’s energy, freezes out the atmosphere and enables China’s colony there to shovel frozen carbon dioxide around into piles so new continents can be built up by depositing rock on top of the dry ice.

On Earth, the globe has warmed, the ice caps have melted, and Manhattan is the new Venice.

On Mars, maybe there are artificial intelligences walking around in human bodies. But nobody seems to like the Martians much anyway. Decades ago they raided Saturn’s moon Titan for half its nitrogen.

You get the ideas. It’s only three-hundred years in the future and Earth’s thirty-seven space elevators have made interplanetary travel fun and accessible and full of wonders for everybody. Except the 47%. Or maybe the 99%. People book flights between Mercury and Saturn and places in between without a hint of a charge card or a satchel of gold-pressed latinum. And I wonder why the lower class in half-swamped New Jersey can’t do the same–order up a ticket to Jupiter. This is a futuristic culture seemingly without money. But there’s money afoot–make no mistake. Some people have it. Others don’t–including a young Jersey hood who makes it into space as a favor for saving the main character’s butt when she wanders off into dangerous territory for an evening stroll.

I thought Robinson did a fantastic job with Red Mars and its two sequels. An ensemble cast of complicated characters struggle to colonize Mars, then turn it into a paradise. The key there was the characterization of a handful of interesting people and how they interacted over decades. The Mars trilogy had great ideas, too. Most of the ideas have been tried elsewhere in science fiction. What made these books exceptional was that they were fine novels. The future science was just part of the background scenery.

2312 suffers from too many ideas and not enough people. Robinson has enough material and imagination to distill a dozen novels from this one book. I would have preferred a story about the people colonizing Mercury, And the people who hollow out an asteroid and turn it into a park. Or how the Chinese developed the chutzpah and technology to steal one of Saturn’s moons. Then let the characters fly out of one of those tales.

Instead, we get a somewhat pedestrian murder mystery set in the early 24th century. The mystery itself could have been rendered in a book one-fourth the size of these 550-some pages.

Robinson gets a lot of credit for great ideas. But not all of them are original to this book. He himself has done the sun shield/magnifier in the Mars trilogy. Space elevators–that too. Hollowed-out asteroids? I read about those in Roger MacBride Allen in the 80′s. The narrative is interrupted a few dozen times so the author can trot out a list or a piece of “future” history. A better writer could have woven that into the narrative and left the rest on the cutting room floor. Or, if you want to imitate Tolkien, put it into an appendix with some family trees.

Here and there Robinson’s science is a bit of a clunker. A high-speed interplanetary voyage using Mars for a gravity assist? With people traversing the inner solar system in a few weeks, that’s just bad physics. The faster a spacecraft travels, the less relevant a gravity assist can be. Later in the novel, Robinson describes a ship that just powers its way from planet to planet in just days. Just go with that.

I suspect most of what the author describes in this novel will happen. But three centuries is way too soon.

The other moment of disconnect was in the writing of one-hundred thirtysomething Swan Er Hong as a spoiled and arrogant little princess. Her 200-year-old grandfather comes off as a wisdom figure. One would think that thirteen decades of life would inspire an end to adolescence at some point. And Swan does develop as the pages turn. Otherwise, she is not a very likeable character. I enjoyed the romance that changes her in good ways. There’s no point in writing Swan as an indulgent and immature soul in a rejuvenated, but old body. Another good novel would be what humanlife and relationships are like when one lives for two centuries.

So, should you read this book? I would read the interludes that describe asteroid development. Skip the lists. The rest? If you like KSR, you will possibly like this book. For me, it felt a bit off. If you’ve never read him, tackle the Mars books instead: red, green, and blue.

Do you think the Church views unbelief as a problem new to this generation? Long before the cult of celebrity hit atheism, it was recognized as a challenge to the modern proclamation of the Gospel.

55. Also significant is the preoccupation of the last Synod in regard to two spheres which are very different from one another but which at the same time are very close by reason of the challenge which they make to evangelization, each in its own way.

The first sphere is the one which can be called the increase of unbelief in the modern world. The Synod endeavored to describe this modern world: how many currents of thought, values and countervalues, latent aspirations or seeds of destruction, old convictions which disappear and new convictions which arise are covered by this generic name!

From the spiritual point of view, the modern world seems to he forever immersed in what a modern author has termed “the drama of atheistic humanism.”[Cf. Henri de Lubac, Le drame de l'humanisme athee, ed. Spes, Paris, 1945]

If Father de Lubac is right–and I lack the original reference to confirm–he might be suggesting that unbelief is always a human intellectual or spiritual flaw. In any event, I think the proper course of action is to emphasize belief in Christ, rather than present the Church as mainly being about the tearing down of alternate systems. What we preach is confrontational enough, I would think. And if Christ is preached effectively, the fruits of such a proclamation will be evidence enough of a stance against atheism.

On the one hand one is forced to note in the very heart of this contemporary world the phenomenon which is becoming almost its most striking characteristic: secularism. We are not speaking of secularization, which is the effort, in itself just and legitimate and in no way incompatible with faith or religion, to discover in creation, in each thing or each happening in the universe, the laws which regulate them with a certain autonomy, but with the inner conviction that the Creator has placed these laws there. The last Council has in this sense affirmed the legitimate autonomy of culture and particularly of the sciences.[Cf. Gaudium et Spes 59] Here we are thinking of a true secularism: a concept of the world according to which the latter is self-explanatory, without any need for recourse to God, who thus becomes superfluous and an encumbrance. This sort of secularism, in order to recognize the power of man, therefore ends up by doing without God and even by denying Him.

I don’t think the contemporary world has changed much. On the other hand, it might be that the strains of secularism and atheism, if always with us, have been freed from a veneer of Christianity. And that may be better for the fruitfulness of the Gospel in the long run. If Christianity is compulsory, or even strongly advised, then can we be sure that religion is not being used as a cloak of deceit by those whose real aims are contrary to the Gospel?

New forms of atheism seem to flow from it: a man centered atheism, no longer abstract and metaphysical but pragmatic, systematic and militant. Hand in hand with this atheistic secularism, we are daily faced, under the most diverse forms, with a consumer society, the pursuit of pleasure set up as the supreme value, a desire for power and domination, and discrimination of every kind: the inhuman tendencies of this “humanism.”

In this same modern world, on the other hand, and this is a paradox, one cannot deny the existence of real steppingstones to Christianity, and of evangelical values at least in the form of a sense of emptiness or nostalgia. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there exists a powerful and tragic appeal to be evangelized.

I certainly agree with Pope Paul VI on this point. The past forty years have found some people perhaps less welcome in the Church to seek a cure for this interior emptiness. That might be a theme worth exploring, but not for me today. Any thoughts, from y’all out there?

I had not considered blogging on the college visits today, but I may offer a few words at this time.

My family lived in Kansas City from 2002 to 2008, and we’ve gotten good care for our daughter’s heart condition there. When we returned to Iowa four years ago, we declined to find a new cardiologist in state. We return for twice-a-year checkups at Children’s Mercy Hospital, a very good place.

I appreciate the offer of prayers. I would never decline them. But for the twelfth year in a row since we adopted her, the report was full of positives. She had been complaining of some pain in her sternum, but it seems that is just irritated bone/scar tissue perhaps bothered by her lifting weights at the high school. A small thing to watch, but no major worries.

The young miss is only a sophomore in high school, but is beginning to form some ideas about going to college and what to study there. Since we were burning a school absence anyway, I suggested we make something of it and try a few test visits in the neighborhood. After getting the great medical report from the doc, we lunched, then scooted to UMKC for a two-hour visit. We spent about fifteen minutes with a graduate student/counselor, then a student took the three of us on a campus tour. Things sure have changed since my college days. Fridges, microwave ovens, and cable tv hook-ups in dorm rooms. Restaurants and groceries in basements. Lots of ways to recreate: athletic center, theatre, concerts, spectator sports. Lots of help for students: counselors, tutors, peers, grad students, and even a writing center where other students will review a paper and give pointers to make it better. UMKC is a big school–close to 20,000 students. Not quite as big as Iowa State, where we live. But big enough.

By 3pm, we made it to Rockhurst University, a private Jesuit school not far from our first visit. Many of the same amenities though with only one-seventh the student body size of UMKC. I don’t think the young miss suspected she was getting hoodwinked to visit a Catholic school. But I thought the atmosphere and culture of a smaller university would give her some perspective on the possibilities. I liked the subtle presence of the Jesuit style, the emphasis on service and leadership, and the sense of a tight-knit family of a smaller school.

At dinner, she wasn’t very talkative about either school. When the teenager doesn’t want to talk, there’s not much point in pressing the matter. About the only thing she “knows” for sure is that she doesn’t want to go to college in the same town as the parents’ home. I can accept that. In almost three years I’ll have to let go for real. We’ll see how ol’ dad does then.

It might be we were premature on college visiting today. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter who thinks she is more mature than she really is. It could be that she’s not quite ready to think of herself as anything other than a high school student in a small Iowa city. Maybe we’ll restart in earnest next year. Unless she’s been bitten by the bug and wants to go road tripping again. There’s no way I would think I was an expert in young female behavior, so I have no idea of the impact of today’s visits.

Back to regular blogging tomorrow.

Posting will be light for the next thirty-six hours. Off for an out-of-town medical appointment for the young miss, plus her first two college visits. Spammers, may I please direct your attention to the numerous Catholic web sites that get more visits than I? Maybe you can crack through there more easily than here. Just enter with iheartorthodoxy@gmail.com and I’m sure you’ll get a notice.

Not much to say on anointing of the sick, other than the issue of accessibility:

§ 109 § The Rite of Anointing and Pastoral Care of the Sick provides for the communal celebration of the sacrament in a parish church or chapel. As noted earlier (Cf. additional sections in this document on accessibility, pp. 16, 23, 24, 29, 32, 38, 39, 68, 69, and 76ff) the church building must be accessible to those with disabilities, including those in wheelchairs and those who must travel with a breathing apparatus. Since many of those to be anointed may be unable to approach the priest, the parish will want to provide an area where the priest is able to approach persons with disabilities with ease and grace. Often this is possible in a section of the church that has flexible rather than fixed seating.

Flexible seating may be helpful. It might also serve to have wider accessibility on certain rows of permanent seating as well. Removing a pew here and there: at or near the front and halfway from altar to entrance may also improve accessibility for the ministers of the sacrament. Consulting with parishioners and community members who might be affected by this situation makes good sense.

All texts from Built of Living Stones are copyright © 2000, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Did Pope Paul have anything to say about reclaiming Christians?

54. Nevertheless the Church does not feel dispensed from paving unflagging attention also to those who have received the faith and who have been in contact with the Gospel often for generations. Thus she seeks to deepen, consolidate, nourish and make ever more mature the faith of those who are already called the faithful or believers, in order that they may be so still more.

The following words were written almost four decades ago. Do today’s alarmists have a problem with plagiarism?

This faith is nearly always today exposed to secularism, even to militant atheism. It is a faith exposed to trials and threats, and even more, a faith besieged and actively opposed. It runs the risk of perishing from suffocation or starvation if it is not fed and sustained each day. To evangelize must therefore very often be to give this necessary food and sustenance to the faith of believers, especially through a catechesis full of Gospel vitality and in a language suited to people and circumstances.

Pope Paul is shortchanging other means of nourishment. Catechesis is definitely important. But the life of liturgy, prayer, and spirituality is a more universal tangent for believers. The experience of knowing God trumps the knowing about God.

The Church also has a lively solicitude for the Christians who are not in full communion with her. While preparing with them the unity willed by Christ, and precisely in order to realize unity in truth, she has the consciousness that she would be gravely lacking in her duty if she did not give witness before them of the fullness of the revelation whose deposit she guards.

We share the preparation for unity: a significant distinction for a church that some members see that all the work toward unity is to be borne by others. Not so.

What the traditionalists really thought of Joseph Ratzinger:

… worse than Teilhard de Chardin and the Modernists.

Three brief sections reflecting on the needs for the Rite of Marriage. First the essentials:

§ 106 § The Rite of Christian Marriage contains no directives about the spatial requirements for the celebration. Instead, the ritual focuses upon the consent given by the bride and the groom, the ambo from which the word of God is proclaimed, and the altar at which the couple share the Body and Blood of Christ within a nuptial Mass.

The Rite of Marriage gives the couple, priest, and parish broad leeway in terms of ritualizing the moments outside of the liturgies of Word and the Eucharist.

§ 107 § The options within the Rite of Marriage provide for a procession of the priest and ministers to the door of the church to greet the wedding party, followed by an entrance procession, or the entrance of the wedding party and movement down the aisle to meet the priest celebrant at the altar. Some planners have experimented with seating arrangements that eliminate a center aisle in favor of two side aisles. Although this plan can be very useful by allowing the congregation to face the altar and the priest celebrant directly, it challenges parishes to plan how they will provide for entrance processions and recessionals, especially during wedding processions when all wish to have equal visual access to the wedding party.

In designing a church, most people will pnder the more popular local option or two for couples, and ensure that a new design accommodates this somewhat. By far I see more of the priest and ministers greeting the couple (reunited) at the edge of the sanctuary.

The reference above to two side aisles is a little curious. Churches with dseating in the round usually have a dedicated central aisle, even if it is not long.

§ 108 § If it is the custom to have the bride and groom seated in the sanctuary, then the design of the sanctuary should be spacious enough to allow an arrangement of chairs and kneelers that does not impinge upon the primary furniture in the sanctuary. Many ethnic groups and local churches have additional customs for the celebration of marriage that can be honored and accommodated when they are in keeping with the spirit of the liturgy.

How many churches provide for the wedding couple to be seated in the sanctuary?

Other observations?

All texts from Built of Living Stones are copyright © 2000, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The real “deeps” of evangelization engage believers with the world’s billions of non-Christians. Sounds scary, but maybe it’s not. Hindus, Buddhists, and even pagans already seek God, pray, possess spiritual and religious traditions. What do you think of the saint’s testimony that non-Christian religions contain “seeds of the Word”?

53. This first proclamation is also addressed to the immense sections of (humankind) who practice non-Christian religions. The Church respects and esteems these non Christian religions because they are the living expression of the soul of vast groups of people. They carry within them the echo of thousands of years of searching for God, a quest which is incomplete but often made with great sincerity and righteousness of heart. They possess an impressive patrimony of deeply religious texts. They have taught generations of people how to pray. They are all impregnated with innumerable “seeds of the Word”[Cf. Saint Justin, I Apol. 46, 1-4: PG 6, II Apol. 7 (8) 1-4; 10, 1-3; 13, 3-4; Florilegium Patristicum II, Bonn 1911, pp. 81, 125, 129, 133; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I, 19, 91; 94; S. Ch. pp. 117-118; 119-110] and can constitute a true “preparation for the Gospel,”[Ad Gentes, 11; Lumen Gentium 17] to quote a felicitous term used by the Second Vatican Council and borrowed from Eusebius of Caesarea.

Such a situation certainly raises complex and delicate questions that must be studied in the light of Christian Tradition and the Church’s magisterium, in order to offer to the missionaries of today and of tomorrow new horizons in their contacts with non-Christian religions. We wish to point out, above all today, that neither respect and esteem for these religions nor the complexity of the questions raised is an invitation to the Church to withhold from these non-Christians the proclamation of Jesus Christ. On the contrary the Church holds that these multitudes have the right to know the riches of the mystery of Christ[Cf. Eph 3:8] – riches in which we believe that the whole of humanity can find, in unsuspected fullness, everything that it is gropingly searching for concerning God, man and his destiny, life and death, and truth. Even in the face of natural religious expressions most worthy of esteem, the Church finds support in the fact that the religion of Jesus, which she proclaims through evangelization, objectively places man in relation with the plan of God, with His living presence and with His action; she thus causes an encounter with the mystery of divine paternity that bends over towards humanity. In other words, our religion effectively establishes with God an authentic and living relationship which the other religions do not succeed in doing, even though they have, as it were, their arms stretched out towards heaven.

This seems clear. Believers respect non-Christian traditions. We confront the difficult questions. But we have no need to back off from telling others what the reason is for our hope.

This is why the Church keeps her missionary spirit alive, and even wishes to intensify it in the moment of history in which we are living. She feels responsible before entire peoples. She has no rest so long as she has not done her best to proclaim the Good News of Jesus the Savior. She is always preparing new generations of apostles. Let us state this fact with joy at a time when there are not lacking those who think and even say that ardor and the apostolic spirit are exhausted, and that the time of the missions is now past. The Synod has replied that the missionary proclamation never ceases and that the Church will always be striving for the fulfillment of this proclamation.

The responsibility we have is for the good of others. We have a mandate from Christ. We all share the call to live a life attractive to others, if not preach Christ explicitly. But the end is not only our obedience to God, but also the ingathering of seekers into Christ.