Dorothy Cummings McLean on Spirit Radio this Friday

Be sure and listen to Spirit Radio this Friday morning at 10.00am. There will be an interview with Dorothy Cummings McLean who writes (with humour and sanity!) about the single life from a Catholic perspective.

And with your spirit!

It's a shame that those who are less than enthusiastic about the new translation of the Roman Missal are making all the noise... This homily by Bishop Conley (Auxiliary in Denver) certainly explains why we should be enthusiastic about the new translation.

When we celebrate the Eucharist, the pope says, we are “entering into the liturgy of the heavens that has always been taking place. Earthly liturgy is liturgy because and only because it joins what is already in process, the greater reality”.13

To drive this point home, our new Mass translation replaces the mundane affirmation – “Happy are those who are called to His supper” – with a confession of faith worthy of the cosmic character of our celebration.

We are not “happy”. We are blessed. We have not been called to any ordinary meal. No, we have been invited to the great banquet of our heavenly King, the wedding feast of His Son, our Redeemer.

Accordingly, we will now pray: “Blessed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb”. Again, the prayer has been there all along in the Latin. The language is an almost literal quotation from the revelation of the heavenly liturgy given to Saint John in the Book of Revelation.14

In the holy Mass heaven reaches down to earth and earth reaches up to heaven. We are worshipping not only in our local church, but in the precincts of Mount Zion, “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and [with] innumerable angels in festal gathering, and [with] the Church of first-born who are enrolled in heaven.”15

That is how the early Christians understood their worship. And it’s time for us to reclaim that same consciousness. We need to come to our worship filled with this same awe for the mystery of God’s love and His covenant plan.

Amen!

A Challenging Read...

There's an interesting article in the Homiletic and Pastoral review by a Fr Ference entitled Why Vocation Programs Don't Work.  One could certainly transpose this article into an Irish key and ask why the life of the Irish Church seems to be in terminal decline.

The root of our current vocation problem is a lack of discipleship. Of course, a disciple is one who encounters Jesus, repents, experiences conversion and then follows Jesus. All too often those of us in positions of Church leadership presume that all the folks in the pews on Sundays, all the children in our grade schools, high schools and PSR programs, all the kids in our youth groups, all the men in our Men’s Clubs and all the women in our Women’s Guilds, and all the members of our RCIA team are already disciples. Many are not. (The same can be said of staffs and faculties of Catholic institutions.) Our people may be very active in the programs of our parishes, schools and institutions, but unfortunately, such participation does not qualify for discipleship.

Read the whole thing and I think you'll find that the discipleship orientation proposed by Fr Ference seems to resonate much more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount than the suggestions coming from some other quarters about a path to renewal.