John Schultz: March 2004 Archives

Our Holy Father should inspire to live fully the work to which we're called.

Pope John Paul II will keep a full Holy Week schedule, including Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square and a Good Friday appearance at the Colosseum, the Vatican said Tuesday

"It ain't over until..."

Formation... It sounds so proper!

Why can't be just educate people through formation instead of having the Vatican issue "repressive" documents about liturgical abuse.

Fact is: the document on liturgical abuse is meant to be used in formation. It addresses the dos and don'ts in areas where some people who have in the past been responsible for formation have failed.

People who are on the CreativeLiturgy™ Bandwagon - take heed! No more stones instead of bread. Stop adding a few tablespoons of yourself into your liturgical activity and pay attention to hundreds of years of standard practice and to the actual text of the Vatican II documents instead of the Voice of Vatican II that you hear in your head.

Seriously. I've had it and skulls will be cracked if you don't pay attention.

I'm looking forward to the Vatican document on Liturgical abuse in the same way I look forward to a constitutional amendment that affirms marriage is between a man and a woman.

What's the correlation?

It's the in both cases, the "informed professionals" have sought to impose norms that are counter to what the average person knows to be true.

If you see a nun in a leotard prancing about the sanctuary during the 1st reading, the average person knows that's wrong.

When mayors are "marrying" same-sex couples, the average person knows that wrong, that it's not a marriage but rather a farce and a political statement.

So the idea that guidelines on liturgical abuse could be "repressive" is quite outrageous. If the liturgists who brought us the Mass of the Unordained Women or the Dance of the Winter Solstice had repressed their own desire to remake the liturgy in their own image, we wouldn't need the document.

People are longing for truth and a prayerful liturgical atmosphere. I'm sure the guidelines will help with that in as much as the Do-it-yourself-Liturgists can bring themselves to obey them.

You been here FOUR HOUR!
You scare my wife!
You eat my profit!

Startling news that will turn the tide.

Headline: Blood Runs thru Streets as an Angry Mob Riots After Seeing "The Passion of the Christ" - Gibson Partially to Blame

er... maybe it's

Headline: Couple Fails to Resolve Rudimentary Theological Dispute and Resorts to Violence. Cops involved.

Via CNN.

Ok... so it's an eco-terrorist.

Still - this is a bit amusing:

In another e-mail, [suspect] Cottrell tried to recruit his fellow Caltech students to pose as runners and plaster 1,000 bumper stickers that read "My SUV supports terrorism" on vehicles in the Los Angeles area. But when the bumper stickers arrived, "terrorism" had been misspelled. The plan was abandoned.

Should liturgical music feel good? If so, not so - why?

And would a white dress be inappropriate?

Kind of cool to have another planetoid around.

It's a place where these guys can go!

Ken Shepherd has some comments related to the post about the St. Joseph novena.

I'm going to defer to my friends at Catholic Answers, who, when I was struggling with things like this, gave me the biblical, theological and rational grounds for what Catholics believe and do. If not for them and God's grace, I might be an angry ex-Catholic today.

Some may grant that the previous objections to asking the saints for their intercession do not work and may even grant that the practice is permissible in theory, yet they may question it on other grounds, asking why one would want to ask the saints to pray for one. "Why not pray directly to Jesus?" they ask.

Also, God answers in particular the prayers of the righteous. James declares: "The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit" (Jas. 5:16–18). Yet those Christians in heaven are more righteous, since they have been made perfect to stand in God’s presence (Heb. 12:22-23), than anyone on earth, meaning their prayers would be even more efficacious.

The full article is available at www.catholic.com.

I watched about 10 minutes of Hannity and Colmes last night and finally couldn't take it any more.

Here's the question: What's worse? Calling someone a crook or calling someone a [name describing a posterior region]?

Both Bush and Kerry have committed verbal gaffes, thinking they were off mic and off camera. Bush and Cheney agreed back in the last campaign that a certain NYT reporter had some personality deficiencies. Kerry's comment calls into question the moral behavior of Bush & Friends.

Why these things are treated equally among the talking heads is beyond me.

start a Novena to St. Joseph.

His feast day is March 19.

Sens. Push Law for Receipt of Votes Cast

Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are pushing legislation that would ensure a printed receipt of votes cast on new touch-screen computer terminals, arguing it will restore voter confidence in the election process.

Don't you think these receipts will end up in the same place your grocery receipts go? The receipt from your trip to Bennigans? Your dry cleaning claim checks? Your lottery tickets?

RC conviced me I should start posting my Catholic choir tidbits here, so I will. He has root access to our Web server after all...

So item 1 is this:

Brian Baldwin mentioned he found the Latin Mass with no singing to be a spiritually uplifting and peaceful experience. I can relate to that, primarily because as a musician I can be easily distracted by the music.

Why is that? Trained musicians like Brian who have years of teaching experience, a graduate degree and thousands of hours of performance experience have had one thing drilled into them: a focus on quality. Mediocrity has no place in musical performance, whether it be a lousy composition or an ensemble that just doesn't cut it.

And so when Catholics like Brian and me get the hit parade of Top 40 ditties composed since Vatican II, mostly mediorce pieces performed by well-intentioned people with a wide range of talent and training, we often can't shake our own training and listen in a uncritical manner.

Critical listening doesn't lend itself to prayer. So we find ourselves wishing for holy silence, or at least lower lowels of clap-trap and ching-ching and God forbid the whap-jingle of the plastic tambourine.

I started reading Music and Morals this week because the author, Basil Cole, OP is part of duo of Dominicans preaching a mission at our parish. I'll blog more specifically about the book at some point, but one of Fr. Cole's key points is that the function of liturgical music is to facilitate prayer.

And I was thinking about some folks who think that if you can't sing along it's not good liturgical music. I know some music directors that minimize the role of the choir because if the choir sings by itself the congregation can't participate. I've experienced people taking offense that they can't sing everything on the program - every note and every word of every piece. There's a gentleman with a loud voice that sings lots of things that are intended for the cantor simply because he knows them (sometimes we have the cantor sing the refrain to the communion hymn prior to the congregation coming in.)

That's simply a misunderstanding of prayer and the role of liturgical music. Vocal participation on the part of the congregation must happen, but just as prayer is a conversation with God and one must listen to God, there are time where a person should listen to the choir. One-way prayer from a person to God doesn't facilitate long term spiritual growth.

So - the drumbeat of "participation" as reflected in having the congregation sing everything is actually not what's intended with liturgical prayer. In the same way we don't say all the prayers of the priest there's a role for the choir to lead and act in some ways as the voice of God at certain times.

The Weather Channel has a build your own tornado game on their Web site. It will provide you a two minute diversion in its current form.

An upgrade that would make me play longer:

The ability to put Andy Rooney in the path of an F5 tornado.