Because Christ Died For Our Entertainment

The Title of this post comes from a comment I left over on Cosmos~Liturgy~Sex, one of my daily reading stops.

According to a Pew Forum study: along with the dramatic growth of Hispanics in the United Sates , we are also beginning to experience a transformation of U.S. religion. About 54 percent of Hispanic Catholics identified themselves as charismatic, compared to about 12 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics. According to the study, the charismatic movement has not turned Catholics into Pentecostal Protestants and has even found that charismatic Catholics are even more likely to pray the rosary, go to confession or serve in their parishes, suggesting a strengthening of Catholic identity. About 4 out of 10 Hispanic evangelicals are converts from Catholicism with a 1/3 citing the lack of excitement at Catholic Masses. According to Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “You could call it bringing the fiesta spirit into the Catholic church.”

I think there’s something that can be learned from this study, but a need to incorporate speaking in tongues and shouting into the Mass? Which part of the Liturgy would be most appropriate for shouting and when would it be most conducive for worship to allow the congregation to speak in tongues? I may be missing the boat on this one, but I don’t believe the Holy Spirit would want to distract the congregation away from the Liturgy, Homily and especially The Eucharist.  Cosmos~Liturgy~Sex. 

St Thomas More’s Dailogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1)

The Dialogue was written by St Thomas More as he sat in the Tower of London awaiting a possibly gruesome death for his fidelity to the faith. The main characters are a young man named Vincent and his uncle Anthony, an aging man of wisdom and intelligence and faith who is on his death-bed. Vincent begins the Dialogue by noting that normally people approached the dying in order to give them comfort. The situation of the world has become such, however, that they, and he, now approach the dying to receive comfort from them. He then speaks about all the comfort his uncle has given him over the years and his anxiety at losing such comfort with Anthony’s death. Anthony responds by rejecting both the comfort the worldly give, and the idea that his death will mean a lack of comfort for Vincent, since God is the chief comfort of all who believe.

Vincent: Who would have though, O good uncle, a few years past, that those in this country who would visit their friends lying in disease and sickness would come, as I do now, to seek and fetch comfort from them? Or who would have thought that in giving comfort to them they would use the way that I may well use with you? For albeit that priests and friars be wont to call upon the sick men to remember death, yet we worldy friends, for fear of discomforting them, have ever had a way here in Hungary of lifting up their hearts and putting them in good hope of life.

But now, my good uncle, the world has become such, and so great perils appear to fall at hand, that I think the greatest comfort a have is when he can see that he shall soon be gone. And we who are likely to live long here in wretchedness have need of someone like you to give us some comforting counsel against tribulation. For you have so longed lived virtuously, and are so learned in the law of God that very few are better in this country. And you have had much experience and trials concerning the things we now fear, having been taken prisoner two times in Turkey, and now likely to depart before long from this life.

That may be your great comfort, good uncle, since you depart to God. But those of us who are your kin you shall leave behind as sorry comfortless orphans. For to all of us your good help, comfort, and counsel have long been our great support. You have not been like an uncle to some, and to others a kin farther removed; rather, to one and all you have been as a father.

Anthony: My good nephew, I cannot hardly deny that there is indeed, not only here in Hungary, but also in almost all places in Christendom, this customary and unchristian manner of comforting. And in any sick man such does more harm than good, by enticing him in time of sickness to look and long for life and leave off meditating on death, judgement, heaven and hell-the very thing that should occupy much of his time, not only in sickness but also his whole life long. Indeed, this manner of comfort which you spoke of seems to my mind to be madness when directed towards a man of my years. For as we well know a young man die soon, just as certainly as an old man will not live long. And yet there is (as Tully says) no man so old but that, for all that, he nonetheless hopes that he may live one year more. Upon this he thinks in his frail folly, and with this though he gives himself that manner of comfort of which you spoke. Then other men come along with like words of comfort thereby adding sticks to the fire which burns up the pleasant moisture which should most refresh him–the wholesome dew of God’s grace, by which he should wish that it be God’s will to be gone from this life, and to be with him in heaven.

Now, as for you taking my departing from you so heavily, basing it as you do, in your goodness, upon the help and comfort I have given in times past…I say that I wish to God that I had done to you and to others twice as much more as I reckon it was my duty to do! So you see, to reckon yourselves comfortless when God takes me hence from this world, thinking that your chief comfort stood in me-this is, I think to cast away a strong staff so as to lean upon a rotten reed. For God is, and must be your comfort, and not I. And he is a sure comforter who (as he said to his disciples) never leaves his servants as orphans, not even when he departed from them in death. But he sent them a comforter as he had promised; the Holy Spirit from his Father, and also himself. And he gave them assurance and made them sure that he would forever dwell with them. Therefore, if you be part of his flock and believe his promise, how can you be comfortless in any tribulation, when Christ and his Holy Spirit, and with them their inseparable Father, if you put full trust and confidence in them, are never either one finger-breadth of space nor one minute of time from you?

To be continued

MAY WITH MARY, DAY 3

“In accordance with this design [of saving the human race] Mary is found obedient, saying, Behold Thy handmaid, O Lord. Whereas, Eve was disobedient, since she obeyed not whilst yet a virgin. Eve, moreover — having Adam for her husband, though still a virgin — through being disobedient, became the cause of death, both to herself and to the whole human race. Whereas Mary, having a husband fore-appointed, and yet a virgin, by yielding obedience, became both to herself and to the whole human race the cause of salvation. And for this reason the Law calls her who is espoused to a man, though still a virgin, the wife of him who has espoused her, thereby pointing to that intercircling which traces back from Mary to Eve. For what is knotted up together cannot be unloosed, except by undoing the whole series of knots, and in such a way that the knots earliest made have to be undone, by first untying the knots that were made later. And so these latter set free the former. Hence, because the unloosing of the first-made must depend on the one made next, it is this latter that has to be undone first. And so said the Lord, The first shall be last, and the last first. The Prophet also signifies the same, saying, Instead of fathers, thou hast children. For whereas, the Lord when born was the first-begotten of the dead, and received into His bosom the primitive fathers, He regenerated them into the life of God, by Himself becoming the beginning of the living, whilst Adam became the beginning of those that die. For this cause also Luke, beginning his genealogy from Our Lord, carried it back to Adam, to signify that it was He who regenerated them [His own forefathers], not they Him, into the Gospel of life. Even so, too, the knot of Eve’s disobedience obtained its unloosing through the obedience of Mary: for what Eve, a virgin, bound by her unbelief, that same, Mary, a virgin, unbound by her faith.” -St Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 3:22, 34. To read the text of his work go here. For an Audio book of the work which you can listen to on your computer or MP3 player go here.