Richard Chonak: June 2003 Archives

The Collect for the Solemnity today is an impressively inverted piece of Latin. Anybody want to help me parse it?

Deus, qui huius diei venerandam sanctamque laetitiam in apostolorum Petri et Pauli sollemnitate tribuisti, da Ecclesiae tuae eorum in omnibus sequi praeceptum, per quos religionis sumpsit exordium.

The tough part is the first long clause (up to tribuisti). I'm not really confident about venerandam -- does it modify laetitiam along with sanctam? What does venerandam laetitiam mean? And where does the genitive huius diei fit in?

CNS reported recently that the Archdiocese of Berlin is closing half its parishes because of overspending and faulty financial planning.

"I will abandon myself fully to the Holy Spirit, allowing myself to be led wherever and whenever the Spirit wants, accompanying the Spirit, for my part, with effective and strong resolutions and serious discernment... The Holy Spirit descends upon us with great gentleness, never with a racket."--MotherCabrini

The constitutional-penumbral "right of privacy" just got bigger, thanks to the Supreme Court. We can look forward to lawsuits, probably soon, that attempt to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act and state marriage laws. The slide continues.

I really ought to have more understanding and sympathy for my pastor. He's an old military guy who would like to give his bones a rest, but instead has two city parishes to take care of.

Somebody mentioned after Mass on Sunday that a certain parishioner had sent a letter to him -- make that another letter -- saying there's too much noise in church, and that he should do something about the women who don't wear veils (!)

The pastor walked by him and said, "I got your very nice letter -- and, no, I didn't throw it out!"

Get a load of these Incredible Hulk green foam hands! Wear these to your next department meeting and watch heads turn!

(Is there a Catholic connection here? Lou Ferrigno, maybe?)

Finally my CD of Melkite Byzantine chant came! (Check out the sound clips.) It's in Greek and Arabic, but I've been going to enough of these to follow it by now, and besides, there's a booklet with the texts.

I hope Fr. Sibley will like the copy I sent him.

Hi, neighbor!

Robert Diaz is moving his Caritate Dei blog from Blogspot to caritatedei.stblogs.org. A big stblogs.org welcome to Robert!

An Italian priest is going to preside over his town's beauty pageant:

"If you look at the girls in an innocent way it's not a sin but a way of thanking the Lord," Carlo Crucianelli, a priest in the central Italian town of Civita Castellana, told ANSA.

Now, this liturgical dance I like!

Adoremus in aeternum Sacratissimum Sacramentum!

A blessed Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ to all our readers (in countries where feasts are celebrated on the days assigned to them by the universal Roman calendar)!

In the past week, there's been a fuss over claims that the US Bishops and the ADL had criticized Mel Gibson's upcoming movie The Passion as anti-Semitic. People huffed and puffed in e-mails and on various fora about how foolish the bishops were -- that they were criticizing a well-intended and pious movie, when there are all sorts of social trends and pronouncements more deserving of rebuke.

As is usual in such cases, the story was pretty garbled: the criticism didn't come from any statement by the bishops, or by a committee of the bishops, but from some group of "scholars" picked jointly by a priest on the USCCB staff and a rabbi with the ADL. And they based their criticism on a draft version of the script that doesn't reflect the actual movie all that well.

The Register reports that USCCB counsel Mark Chopko has apologized for the whole affair. That's a pretty good outcome: maybe the folks at the USCCB are starting to understand that their functionaries create a lot of confusion when their statements and actions go out to the public and are treated as statements by "the bishops".

Fr. Sibley's going to like this web site, I know it: every sappy or goofy image of our Lord that you ever saw, and much, much more. Boy, He puts up with an awful lot.

New England readers will be interested to know that Prof. Scott Hahn is giving a day of talks at St. Joseph Church in Charlton, MA (that's near Sturbridge) on Saturday, June 28. Tickets are $10, and if you're interested, read on for the details:

Thanks be to God: Fr. Dominic Luong, born in North Vietnam but now of New Orleans was consecrated a bishop this week. He will be serving as an auxiliary in Orange, CA.
Update: I've corrected the name of the diocese.

At CWN's Off the Record, Fr. Wilson mentions that the Anglican-use Book of Divine Worship is going to appear in print Real Soon Now. If the sample files on the web are any indication, it's going to be an attractive volume coming in at over 700 pages. Since I'm in San Antonio this week, I'm going to deliver an advance order to the publisher in person.

Update: At Sunday Mass on the 15th, Fr. Phillips said that the book is going to be over 1000 pages, and the price will likely be around $25! Send him an e-mail to let him know, as he says, "how many copies" you'll want.

By the way, get a look at the sanctuary of Our Lady of the Atonement Church.

A reader told us that the new format didn't work well with WebTV, which has a screen resolution of 544 x 372, so I'm offering CL in an alternative format suitable for narrow-screen browsers, at http://catholiclight.stblogs.org/webtv.html. I don't have a WebTV set to test this with, so if this doesn't work quite right yet, specific feedback from readers will help.

While some of the pieces on the Ancient Echoes album are arrangements of Hebrew melodies transcribed by researcher Abraham Idelsohn about 100 years ago, most are not Middle Eastern: they're original work by Christopher Moroney, the leader of the performing group SAVAE. Perhaps the centerpiece of the album is his presentation of the Our Father, or from the first word of the Aramaic text, Abwoon ("Father"). This rendition starts with a minute of creepy group-chanting -- it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it -- and goes on to a male voice pronouncing the text.

Here's the "translation" presented in the album notes:

O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos,
focus your light within us. Create your reign of unity now.
Your one desire then acts with ours,
as in all light, so in all forms.
Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.
Loose the cords of mistakes binding us,
as we release the strands we hold of others' guilt.
Don't let surface things delude us,
but free us from what holds us back.
From You is born all ruling will, the power and the life to do,
the song that beautifies all, from age to age it renews.
Truly -- power to these statements -- may they be the ground
from which all our actions grow. Amen.

Let's stop for a moment and remember that this is coming from the top publisher of parish music and missalettes, and it's being pitched to the liturgy types in your parish and mine.

Anyway, the drummers come in for a minute or so with some movin' beats, and then Mrs. Moroney ad libs her solo version of the text. Groovy, and no doubt very spiritual.

Continuing with the Ancient Echoes album, here are samples from a couple of pleasant secular numbers: Song of Seikilos, whose Greek tune and text were inscribed on a burial stele; and Arabian Dance, another tune collected by the musicologist Idelsohn. OK, readers, help me out: which opera does this little tune remind you of?

I'm in San Antonio this week attending the Usenix technical conference, so
this is a good time for me to give a listen to an album by the San Antonio
Vocal Arts Ensemble, an early-music group based in this city.

"Ancient Echoes" (from World Library Publications -- yes, the missalette publisher) is an attempt to present some very early music: Jewish music as it might have been heard in the time of our Lord. Some of it's good, and some of it's not quite as good. Let's start with a sample.

For all your ladies'-bonnet and men's-zipperless-pants needs.


Beards not included.

Maggie Gallagher notices a court case in Kentucky in which an unusual pre-nuptial agreement was upheld. It provided that the husband's financial liability to the wife would be higher if he sought a divorce for grounds other than adultery. Can the pre-nup turn into an instrument for strengthening the commitment of couples to permanent marriage?

From Holland's De Telegraaf:

BREDA - For the first time in its 700-year existence, the former Norbertine nuns' cloister, later the Cloister Barracks on Cloister Square in Breda, has a public function. After two years of renovation at a cost of 55 million Euros, Holland Casino Breda opens its doors to the public on Friday.

With a gaming area of 13,000 square meters, it is the largest casino in Europe. In renovating the Cloister Barracks, architect Dirk Jan Postel arranged everything so as to preserve the character of the cloister building. For example, several secco paintings discovered during the restoration of the chapel were spared destruction and restored.

Considering that this is Holland, I wouldn't be surprised if the cloister and the casino were operated simultaneously. And in America, who knows what's possible? :-)

(Thanks to The Antipodean for finding the story.)

I've posted a little manifesto for people interested in bringing a blog to stblogs.org.

A few weeks ago, we noticed a fringe group starting up its own illicit Mass with a married ex-cleric at a suburban Boston Elks' club. Now they're moving up in the world, and finding themselves a more suitable worship space: the local Unitarian meeting hall. A few observations:

1. It's not very nice, as a matter of inter-religious relations, for Unitarians to help a group that's trying to start a schism in the Catholic Church. However, this is not surprising, since the UUA has in the past subsidized frauds like "Catholics for a Free Choice".


2. The celebrant of their first Mass in the new location is someone named Ed Minderlein, whose writing for VOTF urges people to leave "the current pyramid hierarchical structure" and "move into small healthy communities" like the Reverend Ed's fringe group where they "espouse the theology of personal freedom".

   This is a clarifying little event that shows what kind of thinking shapes the agenda at VOTF: they're reaching the stage of overt rebellion against the Church. They're not far from certain fundamentalists who hand out tracts and urge Catholics to "come out from among Babylon".

Maybe we should start a movement to identify and expose popular myths. We could call it STULTUS, for "STamp out Urban Legends Totally (US)".

You've probably heard this one before: a frog dropped into boiling water will jump out, but a frog placed in tepid water and slowly heated will fail to notice, and eventually succumb and become frog soup. This is usually presented as a warning against becoming too tolerant of evils.

Numerous preachers who have used the example will be disappointed to learn it's not true.

That's not a big deal, but a few times I've heard a preacher repeat an urban legend that's embarrassingly false or even slanderous. So what do you do then?

A friend forwarded this the other day. CNS columnist Fr. Eugene Hemrick salutes the seminarians of the North American College:

I came to Rome for spiritual renewal, rest and quiet; not to be with the seminarians or faculty of NAC; not to study the college or analyze its student body. However, when you experience wholesome goodness as I did, you cant keep it to yourself. I hope the following column does justice to you, the college and especially the wonderful men I met.

Gene Hemrick

A View of Tomorrow's Priests
By Father Eugene Hemrick
Catholic News Service

This column is part of the CNS columns package.

Sociological studies I have conducted and the scuttlebutt among older priests have been highly critical of today's seminarians. Many are considered rigid, pietistic, out of touch and clerical. Some label them a generation that "doesn't wash windows" or "pick up pennies."

Recently I had the opportunity to go beyond our sociological studies and live an entire month with our seminarians at the North American College in Rome. What I experienced were seminarians who were kind, talented, prayerful and down to earth.

Joanna Bogle on the truly under-served population among Catholics: young men.