The Bible is, after all, a Catholic book.

From one man in white to another.  In his General Audience yesterday Pope Benedict discussed, albeit briefly, the life and work of St. Dominic Guzman, the founder of the Order of Preachers, more commonly known as the Dominican Order.  If you don’t follow me on Plurk, let me only say that the life of this great saint has become the subject of considerable interest for me in the past several months.  Starting with, of all things, a childrens’ book, I’ve found myself fascinated by this man who saw the hurt and pain that poor formation and catechesis can cause and set out without a care for himself to preach the Truth.  St Dominic, ora pro nobis!

For the Catholic and/or book geek.  Reports are Pope Benedict XVI has finished work on the manuscript of the second book in his study in Christology.  If it is anything like his Jesus of Nazareth it’s sure to move the world of Catholic Biblical scholarship, from the scholar to the average person in the pew.

For the tech geek.  Dom Bettinelli posted on the new technology mashup he and a coworker put together for the Diocese of Boston as they participate in the March for Life in Washington DC.  Now that is putting technology to good use.

Earlier I was finally getting around to reading the Pope’s Urbi et Orbi message for Christmas 2009 (see, I told you I was behind on things) and came across this little gem.

God loves to light little lights, so as then to illuminate vast spaces.

Remember that the next time you are faced with some seemingly massive problem.  God knows what He’s doing.

H/T to Fr. Z.

The Papal MC, Msgr. Guido Marini’s talk on a host of liturgical issues (many thanks to NLM for posting the text) has been making the rounds throughout much of St. Blog’s.  It is a relatively long presentation so it has taken me some time to get through, and I’m pretty sure I’ll need to go through it again to get it all, but I wanted to post here before it got away from me any further.  One thing that struck me:

“My Lord and my God,” we have been taught to say from childhood at the moment of the consecration. In such a way, borrowing the words of the apostle St. Thomas, we are led to adore the Lord, made present and living in the species of the holy Eucharist, uniting ourselves to Him, and recognising Him as our all. From there it becomes possible to resume our daily way, having found the correct order of life, the fundamental criterion whereby to live and to die.

Here is the reason why everything in the liturgical act, through the nobility, the beauty, and the harmony of the exterior sign, must be condusive to adoration, to union with God: this includes the music, the singing, the periods of silence, the manner of proclaiming the Word of the Lord, and the manner of praying, the gestures employed, the liturgical vestments and the sacred vessels and other furnishings, as well as the sacred edifice in its entirety. It is under this perspective that the decision of his Holiness, Benedict XVI, is to be taken into consideration, who, starting from the feast of Corpus Christi last year, has begun to distribute holy Communion to the kneeling faithful directly on the tongue. By the example of this action, the Holy Father invites us to render visible the proper attitude of adoration before the greatness of the mystery of the Eucharistic presence of our Lord. An attitude of adoration which must be fostered all the more when approaching the most holy Eucharist in the other forms permitted today.

Read the whole thing, there is a lot more where that came from.  There is so much damage to recover from in so many areas, but the Pope has already begun the great work.  Some day, perhaps, we will talk of this indeed as his Great Work.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a Pope who has spent so much of his time in the Vatican would know how to control information when he really wants to.  But I can’t remember a time in recent history (since, say, maybe Humanae Vitae) when self-styled Vatican watchers were caught more off-guard.

Today Pope Benedict promulgated, among others, the decrees of heroic virtue virtue for Pope John Paul II, which had been well-reported and expected, and to the great surprise of many, the joy of some and the irritation of others, that of Pope Pius XII.  In greatly understated language we simply see these names in a list along with seven others and ten approved miracles, five of which clear the way for canonization and five of which for beatification.  Announcing the heroic virtues of Pope Pius XII at the same time as that of Pope John Paul II was a very interesting way of managing the sure-to-come controversy.

It should be interesting to see now how those who made a great noise against Pope Pius XII, even in the face of continuing and growing evidence of his efforts to save as many Jewish people as possible in WWII, will address this rather ad intra issue.  While I am no expert on Pope Pius XII what I do know tells me this is a well overdue recognition.

One would not, indeed, have thought that Pope John Paul II being named Venerable would be able to be overshadowed on the very day of the announcement.  His was a life of which we are quite unlikely to see a corollary any time soon.  Then again, these are increasingly interesting times in which we live, so who knows what God has in store for us.

The Vatican today announced the motu proprio Omnium in mentem, which makes changes to a few of the Canon laws by which the Church is governed.  Unfortunately to my knowledge a full translation into English has not yet been made available, but that hasn’t stopped the commentary from flying.  In short, the motu proprio does two things:

• Changes the requirements for Catholics who formally defected from the Church such that they are no longer bound to observe canonical form in marriages.  What it, in the end, means is that a great number of marriages that heretofore have been considered valid are now considered null.  Many marriage tribunals are now going to have their hands full figuring out exactly how to apply these newly worded canons.
• Alters the definition of the ministerial function of Deacons, specifically by removing any reference to a capacity to act in the person of Christ the Head, moving that terminology to the canon defining the presbyterate.

Fr. Z shares the VIS story announcing the new motu proprio here (the combox is, per usual, lively and informative), and Dr. Ed Peters gives his commentary on the first bullet here.  I suspect Dr. Peters will help explicate the effect of the second bullet when it is more well understood.  Life, I must say, in the Catholic world is never dull!

In an effort to get my new blogging string off to a roaring start, I thought I’d pull a draft from the archives that I didn’t quite have the guts to finish blogging before.  In all the discussions I’ve had with people from the many corners of the Catholic faith I’ve found that not even the issue of denying the Eucharist to pro-abortion politicians invokes the level of emotion one finds in a discussion about … liturgical music.

I have to admit that I don’t yet know why this is so but it seems there is some sort of innate personal identification between music and belief.  I think there are two aspects which form this identification: 1) the ages old maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (or, the law of prayer is the law of faith) ; and 2) an innate understanding that liturgical music is a part of the Mass, not added to it – that it flows from the faith expressed in the Mass and is a part of it.

But that’s not what I’m here for with this post.  I’m here to cause a little trouble with a quote from then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, a work I’d say is a must-read for anyone interested in discussing the Catholic liturgy in the modern day.  Why cause trouble?  Because he displays the question of music in the liturgy in this quote in a way that opens the discussion on both sides of the new music / traditional music divide with equal parts gratitude and remorse for those who would hold to either.  In just this short paragraph he gives everyone a great deal to think about and an opportunity to reassess old positions.  And people wonder why I’m so impressed with this Pope…  Here’s what he had to say:

As the Church was uprooted from her Semitic soil and moved into the Greek world, a spontaneous and far-reaching fusion took place with Greek logos mysticism, with its poetry and music, that eventually threatened to dissolve Christianity into a generalized mysticism. It was precisely hymns and their music that provided the point of entry for Gnosticism, that deadly temptation which began to subvert Christianity from within. And so it is understandable that, in their struggle for the identity of the faith and its rooting in the historical figure of Jesus Christ, the Church authorities resorted to a radical decision. The fifty-ninth canon of the Council of Laodicea forbids the use of privately composed psalms and non-canonical writings in divine worship. The fifteenth canon restricts the singing of psalms to the choir of psalm-singers, while “other people in church should not sing.” That is how post-biblical hymns were almost entirely lost. There was a rigorous return to the restrained, purely vocal style of singing taken over from the synagogue. We may regret the cultural impoverishment this entailed, but it was necessary for the sake of a greater good. A return to apparent cultural poverty saved the identity of biblical faith, and the very rejection of false inculturation opened up the cultural breadth of Christianity for the future.

So now, I ask you, what does it say to you?  I find great challenge for those on both sides of the debate in this writing, but I’m curious if I’m alone.  Don’t let the combox grow cobwebs…

We’ve been rather busy around the homestead lately, so forgive my tardiness in posting the Holy Father’s prayer intentions for the month of May:

Pope Benedict’s general prayer intention for May is: “That the laity and the Christian communities may be responsible promoters of priestly and religious vocations”.

His mission intention is: “That the recently founded Catholic Churches, grateful to the Lord for the gift of faith, may be ready to share in the universal mission of the Church, offering their availability to preach the Gospel throughout the world”.

Oremus!

It’s a little late in the day, but I didn’t want to let it pass without offering my most heartfelt thanks to God for this wonderful gift of a Pope and ask anyone reading to offer a special prayer that his reign as Pope may be long and fruitful.  Even at his 82nd birthday his energy and vivacity far outpace that of many far younger.  Ad multos annos, Holy Father!