Don't Sell Cardinal B. Short!

"Even the 1983 Code of Canon Law can be considered a consequence of the Council. I must emphasise that the form of the post-conciliar liturgy with all its distortions, is not attributable to the Council or to the Liturgy Constitution established during Vatican II which by the way has not really been implemented even to this day. The indiscriminate removal of Latin and Gregorian Chants from liturgical celebrations and the erection of numerous altars were absolutely not acts prescribed by the Council.

With the benefit of hindsight, let us cast our minds back in particular to the lack of sensitivity shown in terms of care for the faithful and in the pastoral carelessness shown in the liturgical form. One need only think of the Church’s excesses, reminiscent of the Beeldenstorm (the statue/image storm) which occurred in the 18th century. Excesses which catapulted numerous faithful into total chaos, leaving many fumbling around in the dark.

Just about anything and everything has been said on this subject. Meanwhile, the liturgy has come to be seen as a mirror image of Church life, subject to an organic historical evolution which cannot - as did indeed happen - suddenly be decreed per ordre de mufti. And we are still paying the cost today."

This last response of the Eminent Cardinal Church Historian (most notably for me the second paragraph), translated into English by Vatican Insider and reported by Rorate Caeli among others, received a lot of flack in RC's combox. Those who dot the Cardinal's i's and cross his t's take a conspiracy theory as their point of departure and ultimately move again to reject the Second Vatican Council, suggesting an ancient Roman solution to the problem: "C. delenda est!", as if burning the house the Council built to the ground and salting the earth had value beyond its rhetorical flourishes... Sorry, that is harsh, but I think less ingenuous that the spitting rage and cynicism which dismisses the observations of Cardinal Brandmüller.

The German Cardinal's analysis of the phenomenon fits my experience as an adolescent of what happened. What we were learning in high school, what we saw in the first published liturgical texts, didn't necessarily prepare us for some of what then happened: the sudden appearance in our cathedral of an aquamarine colored Formica table altar, the overzealous Irish pastor of the country parish who got men and a truck and hauled all the statues out of the church to the cemetery and smashed them into an open grave, before returning to remove all of the decorative stucco in the church to reveal the bare beams of the ceiling. Not conspiracy theories but the odd spirit of the times explains such excesses: "Excesses which catapulted numerous faithful into total chaos, leaving many fumbling around in the dark."

I honestly think that a cool-headed return to the Constitution on the Liturgy could only light the path to the urgently needed and just begun reform of the reform. The reform of the reform is indeed the premise for the recovery of the broken strains of the liturgical tradition, which will indeed come to be some day thanks to the mutual enrichment brought about though a generous celebration of the EF in parishes and elsewhere alongside the OF.

In all of this, I would be remiss if I did not heartily recommend to priests an attentive study of the rubrics for the proper celebration of the OF and a discovery of the joys in celebrating ad Orientem, joys for the priest celebrant and perhaps even more so for the people hungry for a true and unambiguous focus to worship.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Come to the Lord's Feast!

Tell me how I'm supposed to take these words of St. Augustine about the invitation to the Lord's nuptial banquet and about how He wished to fill the hall after the refusal of the invited guests:

"From the squares and alleys came the Gentiles; let the heretics and schismatics come from the highroads and hedges. Compel them to come in. Here they can find peace, because those who put up hedges are seeking divisions. Let them be dragged from the hedges, wrenched from the thorns. They are stuck fast in the hedges, and they don’t want to be compelled. “Let us come in of our own free will,” they say. That wasn’t the order the Lord gave: Compel them, he said, to come in. Let necessity be experienced outwardly, and hence free willingness be born inwardly." (Augustine, Saint; Daniel Doyle, O.S.A.; Edmund Hill, O.P. (2007-01-01). Essential Sermons (p. 183). New City Press. Kindle Edition.)

There is another text  and more familiar to me than this one from St. Augustine found in the Liturgy of Hours, where he carries on a little dialogue, if you will, with the schismatic, telling him he refuses to let him go. The determination of St. Augustine in both cases, this second one argued from shared Baptism and Sacraments and the other from the Lord's own command: "Compel them to come in!" leave me somewhat speechless. Some of our separated brethren would no doubt pose the question, "Well, who is it that has built the hedge or is caught in the thicket, you or I?" 

Who is it that refuses to come in? How dare I claim priority? There's nothing new in this, as if only our day had discovered free will and respect for the dignity of the other. I would rather suspect that more than one schismatic might have rebuffed St. Augustine in just the same way. That's not the point. I need not be comparing or putting myself pridefully on a pedestal. It is just simply and profoundly that I have to know where I am coming from and act consistently, hearkening to the Lord's command. In all humility, I cannot be unsure of my calling which is from on high, which is to be part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; I cannot fail to heed the Lord's command, "Compel them to come in!"

What about free will? Yes? And... What about Augustine's seeming reply to that objection as well: "Let necessity be experienced outwardly, and hence free willingness be born inwardly." It is not unlike the frequency with which over the years I have found myself uncomfortable with those marriages where the Catholic party doesn't want to "foist his or her religion on the other party", they say... Is it or is it not the pearl of great price? Should we or should we not be burning to share what is dearest to us with the one we love the most? "Compel them" the Lord says, yes, "Compel them". 

A type of door-to-door, soapbox, street-corner preaching Christianity is not what I'm advocating. Being so verbal is foreign to the Catholicism of the ordinary man or woman in the pew. The efficacy of our witness, if you will, is underscored by the obedience of our moving on every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation to assist at Holy Mass. The "compelling" part starts at home. "As long as you're under my roof, son, you're going to Mass with Mother and me!" Let necessity be experienced outwardly, and hence free willingness be born inwardly."

Wars of Religion?

The Crimean War: A History. 

Figes, Orlando

Macmillan. Kindle Edition. (2011-04-12).

Some time back an ambassador friend told me about this book he was reading. He posed some specific questions concerning Russian Orthodox interests in the Holy Land and the earnestness of struggles among the various Christian factions over their rights or prerogatives in the various holy places in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and wherever. My friend marveled at Figes' thesis that religion as much as anything precipitated the Crimean War. He himself being a European, he found it hard to believe that little more that 150 years ago in what many consider a different type of warfare, a close fore-runner of World War I, that Christian people could still get so worked up about such.

He seemed satisfied with my explanation and planted a seed of curiosity which led shortly to an impulse purchase because it really is that easy with Kindle. Anyway, although I am not voracious when it comes to devouring military history, I have been know to read the genre with a certain relish. If you like such, Figes will not disappoint. I truly enjoyed the book and learned that the countless dead from battle, as well as the far greater numbers of people which were displaced marked a trend which savagely continued throughout the twentieth Century and continues today as innocent civilian populations, as refugees, are no longer pushed from one part of a region to another but too frequently almost to the other side of the globe.

More than an analysis of the role played by religion, Orthodox vs. Catholic, Christian vs. Muslim, East vs. West, the book illustrates also through post-war monuments, especially in England, a shift in sentiment toward esteem for the commoner's supreme sacrifice in the service of his country, of his sovereign. In the case of Russia, he lets Leo Tolstoy kind of stand for a world's consciousness transformed by the carnage of what was by far one of the most senseless conflicts of all time and which no one, not even the French really won. Figes would attribute a certain transformation or maturation as happening in the life of Tolstoy, as a result of his time spent in the Crimea.

Religious rhetoric could hardly mask what were naked geopolitical ambitions on the part of all of the War's combatants. Nobody comes out the white knight in shining armor in this one. 

If such books interest you, to my mind I would recommend it as well worth the read. For some of us who live in that part of the world, even 150 years plus later, there's still evidence that a new generation of oligarchs are not the least bit disinclined to send youth to the slaughter or ride rough-shod over other peoples and cultures for the sake of an empire or reign which cannot endure.

The Immaculate Heart / Assumed into Heaven

We're having our first major break in the summer heat here in Kyiv with nigh unto 48 hours of rain (hardly  what you'd call intermittent either!) and much cooler temperatures. I'm enjoying it for no particular reason except that it puts me today in the mood to recollect, ever so fondly, both concerning my birthday saint, the martyr for brotherly love, St. Maximilian Kolbe, as well as concerning tonight's vigil Mass and looking forward to tomorrow's solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (31 January 1673 – 28 April 1716), and countless other great men saints are a constant and for some also unexpected challenge to the hearts and sentiments of many Christians, just because of the way and intensity with which they expressed unbounded confidence in and love for the Mother of God. Too many Christians play shy when it comes to Mary the Mother of God and we object when we are confronted by her saintly courtiers. Thinking of the Pope who gave  Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort  new popularity during our lifetime: How many Catholics, since October 1978, haven't stumbled or flinched when confronted with the explanation behind the motto of Blessed Pope John Paul II, TOTUS TUUS? These recent years and decades have been ones for many Catholics of struggling with the role of Mary, ever Virgin, in our lives. For some folk that struggle finds its focus or is precipitated in the contemplation of her Assumption, body and soul, into Heaven. Death and decay did not touch her body; she is with her Son in glory in the fullness of her holy humanity.

While some people might contend that a priest's greatest challenge is to preach well on a very theological, if you will, solemnity, like the Sunday of the Most Holy Trinity, I would say this is only apparently so because priests often miss the turmoil within the hearts of those down in the pews listening on 15 August. Sometimes we misread the puzzlement of people over a given reading, whether it be the first reading of the Vigil Mass about the Ark of the Covenant or the Reading from the day from the Book of Revelation with images of the Woman and the Dragon. I had a wonderful uncle who was baptized only at past age 60, a devoted husband who had always faithfully accompanied my aunt to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and finally, as much out of love for her as not, took that final and definitive step and requested baptism as a Catholic Christian (as a teenager I was his sponsor!). He was a good man and a devout Catholic. Even so, I remember he'd get quite frustrated each year on the Assumption and ask why somebody couldn't just clearly say what they were talking about. I wish I had listened better to his grumbles, instead of just writing them off to incomplete catechesis. In reality, I think my now long departed uncle and many others rather found and find themselves dumbfounded by the mystery of love which the Church proclaims in the Assumption of Mary.

It is as if it were all too much, that we really don't want to see or cannot bear the mystery of God's unbounded love, shining through Christ's redemptive Sacrifice and manifested in all its implications in Mary His Mother now sharing His Throne and His Glory fully in heaven, as we only hope to be able to do on the last day. As they joyfully protest their love for Mary, people like Blessed John Paul II, Maximilian Kolbe and Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort leave us breathless and lagging behind.

I hope this Holy Day gives you a little pause, some freedom to contemplate such love and by drawing closer to Mary enter more fully into the mystery of our eternal salvation. One of the blessings of a happy and wholesome home life would be that it gifts a child with a sense of the presence of God. Apart from home and hearth, many less fortunate Christians are nonetheless blessed by the schooling they receive at Mary's knee. Pope Paul VI spoke of his longing to linger in the school of Nazareth, in the home of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Would that we all could!

Some of the great masterpiece paintings of all time show the mystery of the Assumption of Mary as including a contemplation of her empty tomb. Assumption artwork is often of rare beauty.

Perhaps the greater challenge is trying to fathom the implications of that which Mary did really and always absolutely, namely her attentiveness to the Word of God, as she took Him unto herself in obedience as His maid servant. Obedience has its yield. Love is to be found nowhere else. We should never leave her side, nor should we ever lag in racing to keep up with these saintly men who were forever outdoing themselves in protesting their love for her, the first and best disciple of her Son.

Where is God?

Some of the more upright and honorable among my readers will have to forgive me this one, but I'm going to side in this one with Father Barron who puts Woody Allen and St. Thomas Aquinas in the same camp for a moment in responding to the old question: "What makes the world go round?"

In Vol. III, Creator Spirit, Explorations in Theology (Ignatius Press, 1993), Hans Urs Von Balthasar entitles part of a section of this tome labeled "Crisis" as follows: "Forgetfulness of God and Christians". I like many things about Von Balthasar, but there he says something I cannot abide just because I don't think it is an accurate perception of the world in which we live. Others can judge between us or judge whether it is not just that things have so much changed in the decades which have passed between our writing. Anyway, here's the quote:

 "But where the question is missing, where there is no mediation by philosophy between science and theology, the dialogue between the world and Christianity becomes impossible. Let us once again make the point clear by means of the reproduction of the situation within the Church: if it is already such a burden (often scarcely tolerable) for the layman who is genuinely concerned and asks existential questions to have a clergyman (who knows all the answers in advance) give him information about God on Sundays, then it becomes possible to understand why the world one day felt that it had been sufficiently informed by Christians about God and said so, and why the world has become sick of asking the question that is canalized into the stereotype catechism questions and finds the equally stereotype answers lying ready in advance." (page 322)

Where in the world does this scenario play out? I just don't know! Any child knows that the "catechism" a Christian might "thump" at a world with "existential questions" cannot be other than a life reverently lived which can challenge the other, yes at times, but which is usually there not so much as any sort of a challenge or confrontation but rather as something gracious and wise more suitable for embracing (hence my reference to Father Barron's movie review). It's like in courting, when the young man (with or without his "existential questions") decides that his will to share the rest of his life with the young woman in marriage, head over heels in love with her for who she is, implies a life and faith choice for him who sees her Christian witness as progress in comparison to the way he has been living. The question of God, if you will, receives short shrift perhaps by comparison with times long gone but only because we let ourselves be too impressed by the wind and the waves (read: media, technology, contemporary sophistication, 3D movies, as you like).

I just finished Gogol's little literary masterpiece "Taras Bulba" which, while giving voice in the novel to many people's lip service to religion both Orthodox (Russian Cossack) and Catholic (Polish), actually says more about the beauty of men in the context of the utter folly of the Cossack reign in a chaotic and generally raucous warrior's paradise. The tragedy of Taras' life which takes not only his own two sons but hordes on both sides of the fight into his own self-destructive embrace has no room for "existential questions". With a less than profound bow in the direction of Von Balthasar, I have to ask myself if anyone really asks existential questions or takes umbrage at a Sunday sermon which indeed talks about God. People are caught up in the whirlwind of the created and never catch their breath long enough to contemplate the Creator and Redeemer.

I think Von Balthasar must have known that but for some reason he did indeed write what I quoted above. I am sorry but the issue has never been one other than good old-fashioned idolatry: replacing God with whomever or whatever, be it a person, a thing or a life-style. Before the golden calf in the desert, Israel utters absolute folly and cries, "Here, O Israel, is your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt!" The issue is one of forgetfulness of the one true God, not of existential earnestness but of mind-numbing distraction.

In this upcoming (and very soon!) Year of Faith, we the community of believers indeed need to thump our catechisms, to brush up on the faith and learn once again and take to heart our basic prayers. We need to allow ourselves to be fed, to hang on God's every word to us in Holy Scripture. From ignorant to informed is only a partial description of what is at stake. We're back to good old question No 1 of the Baltimore Catechism: "Why did God make me? He made me to know, love and serve Him in this life, so as to be happy with Him in Heaven." YouCat and the CCC say the same with contemporary verve and footnotes. Knowing God, I cannot help but love and serve Him. Heaven-ready, then, I reflect His glory in this world for all to see and embrace. I, we as Christians, as Catholics, become, OK, yes a challenge to the world's idolatry, but we also become prophets like Hoseah, called by God to entice His adulteress first love back to faithfulness and thereby to limitless joy.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

All Things not Being Equal?

This morning, by chance, I read a masterful homily of St. Augustine in which, among other things, he distinguishes clearly between a "public reprimand" and "fraternal correction", citing the Gospel basis for utmost discretion when it comes to fraternal correction:

"Let’s act like that, because that’s how we should act, not only when someone sins against us, but also when anybody’s sin is unknown to someone else. We should rebuke privately, censure privately, and not betray people by wishing to censure them publicly. What we are wanting to do is to rebuke and correct; what if some enemy of theirs wants to hear about something he can punish? A bishop, for example, knows someone or other is a murderer, and nobody else knows he is. I want to rebuke him publicly, while you are looking for a chance to bring an indictment. Well of course, I will neither give him away, nor ignore his sin. I will rebuke him privately, set God’s judgment before his eyes, terrify his bloodstained conscience, try to persuade him to repent. That is the kind of Christian charity with which we should all be equipped." (Augustine, Saint; Daniel Doyle, O.S.A.; Edmund Hill, O.P. (2007-01-01). Essential Sermons (pp. 133-134). New City Press. Kindle Edition.)

The great father and doctor of the Church from Hippo in North Africa sees it right to publicly denounce behavior, but argues generally against public denunciations of the one who so behaves. Apart from the exceptional clarity of his words, it would be hard to find novelty in the teaching of the great saint. St. Augustine states quite clearly that a bishop does not necessarily fulfill his shepherding task by means of public denunciation of sinners; he must teach what is right and wrong in principle, while correcting the sinner or wrongdoer in private, face to face. The Bishop of Hippo was hitting hard against the sin/crime of adultery. Maybe a pamphlet should be made of this particular sermon and pressed into the hands of not few adults in our parishes today? All things being equal, his words are immediately and universally accessible in this case yet today.

My question is, why did St. Augustine find this approach sufficient? Why for centuries did many good and excellent bishops find this to be the route to go? We're saying more than "Hate the sin; love the sinner"! We're saying that it is the will of Christ that I not be the cause of another's scandal by reason of my public denunciation of someone whose something may not generally be known. I think I'm referring to the shock and confusion of good people, holy people, smart people, who are or were 20, 30, even 50 years older than me and who over the years, while condemning the sin, expressed honest perplexity over the public wrath directed especially toward priests guilty (seemingly) of having taken advantage of others and most particularly of children and youth for their own ends. Moral outrage over the thing itself is clearly justified and its expression, we hope, will shine light into dark corners and caste out real demons. The other side of the story would seem to include good names destroyed and prison sentences wrongly imposed. In the U.S. big money has exchanged hands, seemly to ease pain or in reparation, but more credibly in many cases for the sole purpose of punishing Church institutions for silence and complicity. I remember the old bishop who ordained me, he was at the time we spoke (just an old, retired bishop and a very young priest) already I suppose 80 years of age, some thirty years ago and not that long before his death, I remember him troubled by the rage which had begun to appear on the American scene at that point, he clearly aware of what was going on, but troubled by an approach to sin/crime which St. Augustine might have found contrary to the Gospel.

We've all read the psychology and we know the lies of the predator unwilling or unable to change his ways. Knowing too the shadow world in which much of this takes place, thinking of the story of Daniel and Susannah's virtue and how rapid the turnaround among the people once God spoke through the boy, then visiting upon wicked old men, whom they knew to be so but found no way to denounce or condemn until a child condemned them with the words of their own mouths, then how do we today justify the rage? The other day on YouTube, I happened across some old Bolshevik or Communist propaganda films denouncing the wicked ways of Czarist Russia and the complicity of the Russian Orthodox Church of such dissolute living, such hypocrisy on the backs of the poor. There was certainly some truth to what was displayed, but the object of such public (newsreel) denunciation was to destroy the establishment and take over the public square in its place. There followed under Soviet regime not only the killings and banishment to Siberia of the Old Guard, but for godless ends also the extermination under first Lenin and then Stalin of millions of those same poor now themselves vilified as impediments to the progress of the great socialist state.

I think each of us has a role to play in turning the page, in reestablishing proper measure in society and in human relations. We do not wish to be the accomplice to anyone's sin, nor the unknowing accomplices to the agendas of our world's new godless, who would only tear down rather than build and plant. Some say it is too little, but more than any other approach I get excited about all the good I see in the homeschooling movement and the vitality which it encourages in children, the first of who have now come of age and are making life choices. Chesterton and many others have argued for a smaller, familial, more interpersonal approach to building society. Being myself from relatively a small-town background, I have never ceased to marvel at how intimate and person-to-person big city neighborhoods are. Family and folk written small are indeed the building blocks not necessarily of what is great but of what is true, good and beautiful. Playing strange as most folks do today is indeed "playing" and far from real or reasonable.

We cannot live without the words of Christ; may His Gospel reign supreme!

Saint Volodymyr

The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah is, for some reason, hitting at me or at my thoughts most insistently in these days. Whether I find his message for me today impelling or haunting is hard to say. As a part for the whole let me take the 1st Reading from this Saturday of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time:

The following message came to Jeremiah from the LORD: Stand at the gate of the house of the LORD, and there proclaim this message: Hear the word of the LORD, all you of Judah who enter these gates to worship the LORD! Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Reform your ways and your deeds, so that I may remain with you in this place. Put not your trust in the deceitful words: "This is the temple of the LORD! The temple of the LORD! The temple of the LORD!" Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds; if each of you deals justly with his neighbor; if you no longer oppress the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow; if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place, or follow strange gods to your own harm, will I remain with you in this place, in the land I gave your fathers long ago and forever. But here you are, putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss! Are you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, go after strange gods that you know not, and yet come to stand before me in this house which bears my name, and say: "We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again?" Has this house which bears my name become in your eyes a den of thieves? I too see what is being done, says the LORD. {Jeremiah 7:1-11}

The question which arises is an old one for me, which I never quite answer to my own satisfaction: Why should the prophet's verdict go any easier on us today? Can we withdraw ourselves from the judgment of the Lord if we have little more to recommend ourselves than did Jeremiah's interlocutors at the time of the Babylonian Captivity? Maybe despite the fact that no one seems to have carried off the material treasures of the visible temple, maybe even so we find ourselves destitute and in exile? 

Just yesterday, I was troubled by the "optimism" or superficiality of an Olympic themed video apology for the Church's investing heavily in sports training as a way to recover our troubled and confused youth (see CNS). It could be that the featured chaplain is on to something, but I am rather inclined to listen to an old and respected coach who observed that sports today is little more than a mirror of that society of ours which seems to be in free fall: young individual performers with no life beyond training and competition for medals, team sports in decline, drugs, sex and violence invading the playing fields and locker rooms. At home, in the newspaper, I read a piece about a graduating senior girl who had been on her high school's boys wrestling team but was looking at a scholarship from a girls team for college; she didn't have the upper body strength for college men's wrestling, she said. Granted, it was a public high school, but this is one of  myriad examples one could cite to illustrate why "sports" is not necessarily the lighthouse pointing to the safe harbor in the midst of youthful turbulence. 

Elsewhere (Chapter 24) Jeremiah speaks of two baskets of figs: one good and one bad. The good figs would represent those carried off into exile in Babylon, now busily putting together an ordered life for themselves far from home and temple, and the bad were those left behind or clinging to the Land, the Temple and appearances. "But here you are, putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss! Are you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, go after strange gods that you know not, and yet come to stand before me in this house which bears my name, and say: "We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again?" Has this house which bears my name become in your eyes a den of thieves? I too see what is being done, says the LORD."

The continued existence of the temple is not the assurance. Mark's Gospel begins with a call to repentance. I don't know how we can get around consistently, credibly pronouncing judgment in God's Name, just like a genuine Old Testament prophet, just like Jeremiah. I suppose the consumption which accompanies Olympic games, like the forty million something spent on the opening ceremony in London, may say something noble about the human spirit... Just try and convince me! Just try and argue that direct aid to alleviate suffering is a bad investment because it doesn't address the roots of the problem or problems which occasion misery.What would Jeremiah say about all the blood shed today: in abortion clinics, through euthanasia, by destabilizing regions, trading arms and drugs? Granted, many of those movers and shakers claim no need for the traditional temple, but they are not without their so-called sanctuaries.

Yesterday, in my last Ukrainian class before the summer break, my prof had me read a little story about a wise old man, wealthy, who with death approaching called his only son and handed over his money to him, telling him to travel and make homes for himself everywhere to which he might turn in time of need. Time passed and the son returned to his father, who asked him how his expedition went. The young man described having spent money to built palatial little places on every height and along every stream which suited his fancy. Old Dad lost his patience and labeled the son a fool for not having understood the import of his words and, namely, that he should have used the money to help others such that in time of need they would in turn welcome him.

I'm not going to condemn investing in sports, that would be wrong. I think I'll let Jeremiah sink in a bit more and invite my readers to do the same. Neither the stadium nor the temple as such is the guarantee of that which makes for life to the full, namely living in the presence and according to the will of the only GOD, living and true. We speak quite glibly of the "domestic Church" with little or no understanding that we, as parents or as presbyters, are responsible for mediating in that context and beyond the loving presence of the God Who made us and saved us and Who calls us to Himself in glory.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI