Bishop of Lancaster asking tough questions

Bishop Campbell of Lancaster is following in his predecessor's footsteps in calling to account those schools - and other institutions - that claim the name of Catholic but are CINO (Catholic in Name Only). Here's what The Tablet Blog reports:

Lancaster's hermenuetic of continuity

Posted by Christopher Lamb, 5 January 2012, 9:00
The Bishop of Lancaster has set a cat among the pigeons. Can the Church, he asks in a New Year Pastoral letter, continue to fund Catholic schools which he defines as being Catholic in name only? By this Bishop Michael Campbell means those schools where Catholic pupils and teachers are in a minority.

Bishop Campbell is also asking a much wider question: can a diocese continue to fund any school, parish or initiative that is not actively engaged in the new evangelisation?
All this, people may observe, sounds remarkably similar to the ideas of the bishop's immediate predecessor, Patrick O'Donoghue.
"POD", as he is affectionately known, wrote a series of documents called Fit for Mission? which looked at every area of the Church's life stressing that each exists to evangelise and must have a strong, visible Catholic identity.
In the document on education, which consistently stressed the importance of a school's Catholic ethos, he wrote: "every Catholic school in the diocese should be engaged in catechesis and evangelisation. There must be a clear, courageous, and comprehensive proclamation of the Church's doctrinal and moral tradition, to staff as well as pupils, and appropriate to different age groups."
These documents received fulsome praise from Vatican officials but there was a deafening silence from his brother bishops. There was a feeling that POD was out on a limb and he told me - though he later denied it - that the Archbishop of Westminster to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor should come from outside the current bishops of England and Wales.
When Bishop Campbell succeeded POD in 2009 we heard little about Fit for mission?. Bishop Campbell is a good and holy man and initially seemed happier giving homilies on the exegesis of a scripture passage than on dealing with how the Church faces up to the hard, practical task of running itself in the twenty-first century. Now things have changed and he appears to have aligned himself in a "hermeneutic of continuity" with his successor.
Whatever the politics, the bishop is addressing tough questions that other dioceses cannot ignore.
Christopher Lamb is the Assistant Editor (Home News) of The Tablet.

H/T: Protect the Pope.

Kenrick-Glennon Seminarians launch new journal "Vox Christi"

I received this information recently which I gladly pass on:

Allow me to introduce you to a new and exciting project from Kenrick–Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri calledVox Christi, a quarterly publication of the seminarians of Kenrick–Glennon Seminary created in response to the Holy Father’s call to develop a life cultivated by art and prayer. Vox Christi seeks to share with the world the spiritual, the academic and the artistic fruits of our community to people of all ages and academic abilities in a manner that assists in building up the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Vox Christi is written with the larger public reading audience in mind and has received a considerable amount of feedback already. A wide range of interested institutions and individuals have expressed their desire to subscribe to our journal, from high-schools, Catholic College Student Centers, Universities, Seminaries, priests, and individuals have subscribed to our journal. I ask you first and foremost for your prayers as the seminarians join you in spreading the New Evangelization. We would also greatly appreciate any publicity you could give to our publication if only just a quick mention of it.

You can reach our own blog at http://voxchristilive.blogspot.com/ or check out our Facebook page under the same name. We can be contacted at voxchristi@my.kenrick.edu or by mail at 5200 Glennon Dr. St. Louis, MO 63119.

Know of our prayers for you as you continue to spread Christ. Please keep us in yours.

The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel

This will be my "Desktop" item for this coming weekend's parish bulletin for the Solemnity of the Epiphany.

“Going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him.” (Mt 2:11 - RSV)

This is a very striking phrase from Matthew’s Gospel. These wise men fell to the ground when they encountered “the child”.

Many would consider kneeling, or prostration, beneath man’s dignity. We should not be humbled before anyone, not even our God. We should not demean ourselves by falling down. We should stand face to face before our God. This is folly! The Magi - pagans! - of today’s feast teach us true wisdom.

Bishop Sample gave all the priests of the diocese a Christmas present: a book by the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, entitled The Spirit of the Liturgy. Our bishop clearly desires that we priests study the Pope’s book and apply it to our liturgy today. I first read this book soon after it came out in 2000 and consider it a charter for renewal of our Catholic worship.

Pope Benedict writes about the gesture of prostration or kneeling. He says that kneeling, of its very nature, “does not come from any culture.” In other words, those who protest that kneeling does not belong to their culture do not understand that kneeling “comes from the Bible and from knowledge of God.” “We now kneel before that humility” of Christ “which went as far as the Cross”. “The kneeling of Christians is not a form of inculturation into existing customs. It is quite the opposite, an expression of Christian culture, which transforms the existing culture through a new and deeper knowledge and experience of God.”

Pope Benedict stresses the importance of the unity of our spiritual dispositions and our bodily postures. “The bodily gesture itself is the bearer of the spiritual meaning, which is precisely that of worship. Without the worship, the bodily gesture would be meaningless, while the spiritual act must of its very nature … express itself in the bodily gesture… When kneeling becomes merely external, a merely physical act, it becomes meaningless. On the other hand, when someone tries to take worship back into the purely spiritual realm and refuses to give it embodied form, the act of worship evaporates, for what is purely spiritual is inappropriate to the nature of man. Worship is one of those fundamental acts that affect the whole man. That is why bending the knee before the presence of the living God is something we cannot abandon.”

Pope Benedict  gives Holy Communion to  communicants
kneeling and on the tongue. “The man who learns to believe
learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar
with kneeling would be sick to the core. Where it has been lost,
kneeling must be rediscovered…” (Pope Benedict, Spirit of the Liturgy)

Sadly, this gesture of bending the knee has been abandoned by many who either simply ignore the presence of the Lord in the Tabernacle, or who bow rather than genuflect. Obviously one understands those whose knees are weakened by ill health or old age and for whom kneeling/genuflecting would be painful. But for the rest, Pope Benedict says that “the Hebrews regarded the knees as a symbol of strength; to bend the knee is, therefore, to bend our strength before the living God.” He relates a story that comes from the Desert Fathers according to which the devil showed himself to a certain Abba Apollo. “He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but, most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.”

Pope Benedict concludes his consideration of kneeling as follows:

“The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick to the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ himself.”

O come, let us adore him!

Teenage mother gives her life for her unborn child: a legacy of sacrifice, not tragedy.

A young teenage mother, when diagnosed with cancer, refused any further treatment once she discovered she was pregnant and died soon afterwards. The story has, apparently gone round the world. May others be inspired by Jenni's example.

See LifesiteNews for the full story.

The following video is from kpvi.com

You either get it or you don't - Rick Santorum on marriage

Go to Catholic Bandita for further comment.

Benedict XVI has not the temperament of a ruler - BBC World Service on Vatican Foreign Policy

At one moment people want the Church to disappear and lose its international profile. Now there is a complaint that Pope Benedict is not sufficiently a ruler - he "has no geopolitical vision" according to Marco Politi in the excerpt from this morning's Newshour from the BBC World Service. I don't know how long this link will be available. I made a recording but it does not appear to be possible to upload it.

The above found at Marco Foppoli

Should Pope Benedict not have discarded the tiara - the sign of temporal power - from this papal shield? Perhaps the next Pope will restore it! Pope John Paul II had it.

One thing we can take from this, however, is that the world does, after all, look to the Papacy for direction. Pope Benedict, of course, was not a diplomat but a pastor and an academic. His domain, prior to becoming Pope, was the Faith. He appears to be putting most of his effort directly into restoring faith within the Catholic Church. He has also appointed non-diplomat priests to certain key nunciature positions. History will judge the wisdom of this approach in the light of the current times in which we live.

Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter

It is most unusual for anything official to come from the Vatican on January 1st but today the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has erected the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter within the territory of the United States Episcopal Conference. This juridical structure, equivalent to a diocese, will welcome former Anglicans in the US who wish to be or are already members of the Catholic Church.



The decree of erection can be found at the website of the US Ordinariate. The Ordinariate has its principal church at Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston, Texas. The British Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham does not yet have a church. Their American counterparts clearly have an advantage here having been able to make use of a pastoral provision which enabled former Anglicans to worship as Catholics but with a so-called Anglican use liturgy and their own churches.

The Ordinary is Father Jeffrey Steenson. The Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter has as its patron the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Walsingham. It is wonderful that this little shrine in Norfolk, England, is a uniting focus. May Our Lady of Walsingham's prayers bring about the unity of Anglican and Catholics.

The Ordinariate has a very smart looking website with lots of information. Of interest is its mission page which describes the Ordinariate's mission under the three headings of liturgy, ecumenism and evangelism.

Other places with news of this historic event:

Catholic Online
Rorate Caeli
Fr Stephen Smuts Blog
Ordinariate Portal
And many others - just google Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.