Are you wondering how to go about restoring the original sequence of the initiation sacraments in your parish? In an article for the April-May issue of the FDLC Newsletter, Don McKenzie writes about the process through which the parishes of St. Peter and Our Lady of Fatima (Spokane, WA) went. "When we began this process," writes McKenzie, a pastoral associate in his 6th year at St. Peter, "our bias was to move the age for celebrating the Sacrament of Confirmation from 8th grade to an older age. However, after months of studying the history of the current practice and the theological and psycho-developmental issues, especially the role of parents as primary educators of their children, the task force reconsidered its original bias."
McKenzie says the restored-sequence practice has not been a panacea, but "it has answered a few questions and cleaned up a few anomalies. More than that, it has pushed our parish to expand our understanding of what full, conscious, and active participation in the life of God means.... Fully initiating children means incorporating them into the fullness of the Christian identity at an early age so they grow up in that identity."
- NW
Catholics who go to church regularly are more likely to be interested in fine arts than are church-going Protestants or non-church-going Catholics. That's the claim made by Andrew Greeley based on research done by the National Opinion Research Center. Greeley, who wrote about the study in the May 18 issue of AMERICA, claims that the liturgical imagination fostered by Catholic liturgy and sacramentals generates an increased interest in the fine arts. He goes on to say, "This liturgical imagination suggests that there is a distinctive and very powerful liturgical spirituality among Catholics. It is this (mostly) unperceived liturgical spirituality that merits further reflection as a resource and a challenge for Catholic leaders."
But what Greeley means by "liturgy" may not be what some "liturgists" have in mind. "Nothing could be more destructive of the liturgical imagination than what passes for liturgy in many U.S. parishes: precious theorizing, cute tricks each week, inarticulate commentators, semi-literate readers, drab music, a multiplication of non-canonical (and hence illegal) rules by various gate-keepers, liturgists, religious educators, adult catechumenate directors, and poor homilists. If the liturgical imagination continues to survive, it will do so despite the `liturgists' and not because of them.
Surely he is not speaking of ML-subscribing parishes!
- NW