Tag Archives: pope francis

Amoris Lætitia & Accompaniment

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

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Saint Mary’s Seminary, Houston TX

This article was first published at the website of the Catholic Herald on 12 April 2016:

The language of accompaniment is nothing new to the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Lætitia, released last Friday, nor even to the pontificate of Pope Francis.

In his own apostolic exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict XVI used the same term in the same context of the pastoral care of the divorced and remarried.

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Homily for Trinity XVI

20 Sunday Sep 2015

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Window depicting Saint Peter (Max Ingram Studio), Saint Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, MD

Window depicting Saint Peter, Saint Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, MD

Unless you have been on another planet, you will know that this week Washington, D.C. will welcome an important guest. For a city accustomed as it is to greeting significant persons, from those renowned for acts of heroism, academic ability, or sporting prowess, to heads of state (I believe the King of Spain dropped by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this week), there is a surprising amount of excitement as we prepare for the arrival of Our Holy Father, Pope Francis, on Tuesday. In an interview this week, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, in his capacity as the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, underlined why this might be so: “The Holy Father,” he said, “comes as a pastor”. How true this is. As the Successor of Saint Peter, to whom Christ entrusted the power of binding and loosing hand-in-hand with the command to “feed my sheep”, the Holy Father stands in the shoes of the fisherman and as such is bound to exercise the pastoral office given him as the shepherd or pastor of the whole of Christ’s flock (Jn 21). As Peter was girded about and led to martyrdom, so his successors are called to set aside their own life in service of the universal Church as “the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful” (LG 23).

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CMAA 2014: A New Creation

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Sanctuary of Saint John the Evangelist, Indianapolis, IN

Sanctuary of Saint John the Evangelist, Indianapolis, IN

In his apostolic letter on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the constitution on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Saint John Paul II wrote, ‘the Liturgy is the privileged place for the encounter of Christians with God and the one whom he has sent, Jesus Christ’. In the sacred liturgy, then, the praying Church on earth encounters her Lord and God in a unique way as she is caught up in the eternal worship of heaven – the selfless love-giving relationship between the persons of the Most Blessed Trinity.

It is for this reason that we can describe the sacred liturgy, in the words of Father Faber of the Oratory, as ‘the most beautiful thing this side of heaven’. And it is to emphasize this reality that the sacred liturgy bids us join the singing of the Sanctus, together with the saints and angels in the Church’s hymn of praise, a Church present both in earth and in heaven. Thus we can say that the worship of the New Jerusalem is, in the authentic celebration of the sacred liturgy, presented to us who still labour below. In the sacred liturgy, we say, the curtain between heaven and earth is pulled back for us to see into the fullness of the life to which we are called.

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Sharing the Treasure

19 Saturday Oct 2013

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The primary purpose of the newly promulgated liturgical texts for the personal ordinariates is ‘to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared’ (AC III). It is clear that, from their use by the clergy and lay faithful of the ordinariates, these texts provide the primary way in which the Anglican patrimony is transmitted within the Catholic Church. How, then, might the desire of the Apostolic Constitution for these texts to be ‘a treasure to be shared’ be made manifest?

In his comments on the recent celebration of the new Ordo Missae in this week’s Catholic Herald, Dr Joseph Shaw says, ‘The newly unveiled liturgy of the ordinariate is to be welcomed both because it affirms the important principle of liturgical pluralism in the West, and because it represents a move forward in official thinking about the reform of the liturgy. Like the use in the ordinariate’s Calendar of Septuagesima (pre-Lent), the appearance (at least as an option) of the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar and the Last Gospel restore much-loved elements of the ancient Catholic Mass which were stripped away following the Second Vatican Council. The arguments against these, that they were strictly unnecessary and confused the sequence of events in the rite, have been overtaken by a new sense that the Mass should introduce worshippers into the liturgy of heaven where, as Pope Francis recently remarked of the Eastern liturgy, “time does not count. The centre is God”. In short, this represents a decisive rejection of a reductionist and functionalist understanding of the liturgy’ (Catholic Herald, 18 Oct 2013).

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Homily: New wine, new skins

06 Friday Sep 2013

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Detail from Arundel Cathedral, Sussex, UK

Detail from Arundel Cathedral, Sussex, UK

This homily was given to the Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matara, who have a house in the parish here in DC:

One of the principal calls of the New Evangelisation is the renewal, within the life of the Church, of those who practice the faith, and also those who have lapsed. By this initiative of successive popes, the Church is being called to discover again the unchanging truths of the gospel, and to proclaim them afresh with new ardour, methods, and expressions, in order that all the baptized might be renewed with the grace the Lord offers us by his death and resurrection, and which is the source of our hope in the eternal life he has won for us.

Today’s gospel has something important to say us as we consider this urgent task. Amidst all the excitement and bustle that surrounds the many projects, initiatives, and activities of the New Evangelisation, must be an equally fervent and yet silent interior renewal, that makes us ready to receive the graces of this endeavour and to act on them, as we seek to bring the gospel once more to the world. If we simply continue to pour the ‘new wine’ of a renewed faith into the ‘old skins’ of our unchanged lives, without the interior evangelisation and conversion that is required for each of us, then all the engagement with culture and social media and liturgical renewal that we can muster, will count for little.

On this First Friday, when we commemorate the Lord’s sacred heart, that interior renewal which we require is very clearly presented to us. Just as Christ was entirely consumed by his love for us, so we must have hearts that consume our own earthly desires and wills, in order that his heart might reign in us, and work through all that we do. To have the heart of Jesus Christ within us is to have exactly the ‘new skins’ we require to be truly and profoundly transformed by Christ ourselves, and so be transformative of the culture of death and provisionality that exists around us.

As Pope Francis has said, “evangelisation is done on one’s knees”. Here, in the Mass especially, may that work of our renewal begin again, that Christ may work through us and his mercy and grace and love may be made known.

WYD & Peer Evangelization

26 Friday Jul 2013

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This evening I was watching the live feed from Rio as Pope Francis officially opened the 28th World Youth Day on Copacabana beach, renamed by the Twitterati as #Popacabana for the duration of the week. After the Pater Noster (sung beautifully to the Solemn Anaphora Tone, for those interested in that sort of thing), and the final blessing, that great anthem of World Youth Day, Jesus Christ you are my life, struck up. Immediately my mind leapt back to those wonderful days in Madrid a few years ago, and I quickly fired-off a text to a Norwegian priest-friend who is in Rio, reminiscing and promising prayers from England for the event.

Live feed. Twitter. SMS. World Youth Day has become an amazing Catholic moment in the social media world, and we have almost missed the significance of what is going on here. As I type this, #PontifexRio, #PapaFrancisco, and #Copacabana, have all been trending worldwide on Twitter, not just from on the ground in Brazil, but from across the world, as young Catholics enter into World Youth Day like never before.

In his message for WYD this year, Pope Benedict XVI (as he was then) spoke specifically about the need for young people to engage a ‘missionary commitment’ in the area of social communications. As well as quoting his Message for the 43rd World Communications Day in 2009, he asked young WYD pilgrims, who “have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication, to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this ‘digital continent'”, and to “[l]earn how to use these media wisely”. It seems to have worked.

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Sacra Liturgia 2013: Some Comments

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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Two weeks ago I attended the 2013 Sacra Liturgia conference held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. The conference was organised by Bishop Dominique Rey of the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon as an opportunity ‘to study, promote, and renew appreciation for the liturgical formation and celebration’. I hope, over the next few weeks, to write up some more comments on the excellent talks and papers that were delivered, but I also wanted to simply make note of a few of the particular highlights of the conference whilst they are fresh in my mind.

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Clericalisation of the laity

15 Monday Apr 2013

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As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the then-Cardinal Bergoglio made these remarks regarding the problem of the clericalisation of the lay faithful:

“There is a problem, and I’ve said it many times before: the temptation of clericalisation. We priests tend to clericalize the laity. We don’t realize it, but it is like our [clerical state] being contagious. And the laity – not all, but many – ask us on their knees to clericalise them because it’s more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of the way [of life] of the laity. We don’t have to fall into that trap. It is a complicity that is sinful. Neither to clericalise nor to ask to be clericalised. The lay person is a lay person and has to live like a lay person with the strength of baptism, which renders him capable of being leaven of God’s love in society itself, to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from the pulpit but from his or her daily life. And carrying the cross like we all do. The lay person’s cross, not the priest’s cross. Let the priest carry the priest’s cross. God gave him shoulder enough to bear it”.

Read it all in Spanish here. h/t The Gregorian Blog.

Courage of Peter

14 Sunday Apr 2013

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Pope Francis spoke these words this evening as he visited the fourth Papal Basilica of his pontificate.

Mass at the Papal Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls, 14 April 2013
“We should all ask ourselves: How do I bear witness to Christ through my faith? Do I have the courage of Peter and the other Apostles, to think, to choose and to live as a Christian, obedient to God? To be sure, the testimony of faith comes in very many forms, just as in a great fresco, there is a variety of colours and shades; yet they are all important, even those which do not stand out. In God’s great plan, every detail is important, even yours, even my humble little witness, even the hidden witness of those who live their faith with simplicity in everyday family relationships, work relationships, friendships”.