WORSHIP TIMES

Good news/bad news

"How can we be sure that what we preach is truly Good News, that is Gospel?" Peter John Cameron, OP, posed this question in the July 20 issue of America. Cameron, chair of the homiletics department at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, in the Archdiocese of New York, offers seven guidelines for making sure the news is good.

Emphasize what God has done and continues to do in people's lives.
Preach Christ crucified.
Preach Gospel themes, which include divine mercy, service to the poor, compassion, hope, reconciliation, God' delight in us, and resurrection, among others.
Preach the main motivations of the incarnation: Jesus came to save, to enfold us in God's love, to show us the path of holiness, and to enable us to share in God's life.
No moralizing.
Preach the fact that only God's initiative, not our own sheer willpower, can make it possible for us to reform our lives in faith.
Preaching should connect people personally with Jesus Christ and proclaim his passion and resurrection.

Bread and Cup

Communion under both kinds has become mandatory in the diocese of Charleston, SC. Last spring, Bishop David Thompson issued a letter to the priests and pastoral administrators of his diocese in which he said, "I hereby instruct you, if you are not already doing it, to offer to your people the reception of holy communion under both kinds on Sundays and holy days of obligation." The requirement was to take effect beginning with Corpus Christi Sunday, 1996. Thompson also recommended that pastoral leaders consider offering communion under both kinds during weekday Masses, weddings, and funerals. Thompson based his decision on the 1984 ruling of the Congregation for Divine Worship, which confirmed the decision of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to extend communion under both kinds to the members of the assembly at Mass. He also referred to the document, "This Holy and Living Sacrifice: Directory for the Celebration and Reception of Communion Under Both Kinds," which was prepared by the secretariat of the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy.

Thompson also stated his clear preference that the precious blood be received from a chalice to the exclusion of other methods such as intinction.

Thompson also reiterated the long-standing liturgical directive that the bread distributed at communion be consecrated at that Mass in which it is distributed.

OCP is a good place

Congratulations to OCP Oregon Business magazine recently ranked OCP as one of the best 100 places to work in Oregon. OCP publishes Today's Missal, Breaking Bread, Glory and Praise, and the Catholic Sentinel , the newspaper of the Portland, OR, archdiocese.

St.Benedict.com

Benedict, patron of the information superhighway? Why not, argues Peter Gilmour in the "Odds and Ends" column of the July U.S. Catholic . There are a lot of reasons to log on to Benedict when praying that you have enough RAM to load a graphic-intensive Web site or when you want to beseech the heavens that purveyors of spam lists will suffer eternal damnation. Benedict's followers have long dealt in "information" by collecting, preserving, illuminating, and sharing knowledge. The Web is just the latest place in which Benedictines carry on that tradition. To see some examples, log onto the home page of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN (http://www.osb.org/osb), created and administered by webmaster Richard Oliver, OSB. From there, you will find links to monasteries all over the world. Gilmour suggests the site at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico (http://www.technet.nm.org/pax.html) as the most advanced and artistic of the Benedictine home pages.

No women allowed

Fr. Avery Dulles, SJ, recently urged the U.S. bishops to speak strongly and with a unified voice in opposition to the ordination of women. Speaking at a closed session at the bishops' meeting in Portland, OR, last June, Dulles warned of an impending crisis that would compare to the dissension that followed Humanae Vitae?s reaffirmation of the ban on artificial birth control in 1968.

Dulles, professor of religion and sociology at Fordham University in New York, found no merit in any of the arguments in favor of ordaining women. He advised the bishops to move quickly against the "radical position" that opposes the position of the Vatican.

A copy of Dulles' talk was sent to all U.S. bishops, and a summary of the presentation appeared in the July 26 issue of the National Catholic Reporter. Tom Roberts, staff writer for the NCR, interviewed several of the bishops after Dulles' talk. Despite Dulles' call for a unified voice, Roberts found "a wide range of views" on the issue. While the bishops may have different views on the ordination of women, however, Roberts reports that "all of the bishops interviewed endorsed enthusiastically the idea of discussing controversial issues, and all said they would prefer open rather than closed sessions.

McSpirituality

Where do the pastoral leaders of your parish go when they go on retreat? That's the concern of Eugene Kennedy in an article titled "New Age Spirituality" in the Spring 1996 issue of Notre Dame Magazine. "Lay people understand that most of their ministers go away in order to bring back to their pastoral work a deepened grasp of the theological, scriptural, and liturgical staples of the Catholic tradition," writes Kennedy. "They might be surprised, however, to learn that a substantial and largely unexamined subset of these institutes of pilgrimage provides something quite different from that .... [These] journeys constitute a 'shadow' of mature Catholic spirituality, its pallid ghost."

Kennedy quotes from a brochure for a retreat for women promoted by a center which offers a similar program for men. The program promises to "empower women through a transformational journey deep within herself to discover her soul, her unique feminine qualities, her innate goodness and beauty — this bringing to harmony her inner and outer worlds."

"These," says Kennedy, "are not the words of eternal life."

Kennedy identifies "sacred psychology, art therapy, Feldenkreis movement, Enneagram, t'ai chi," among others, as romantic, self-oriented approaches that "are more New Age than New Testament."

Kennedy criticizes the quasi-sacramentalization of the earth and the rise of "eco-spiritualities" that are shallow rip-offs of Native American spiritualities and symbols. He laments an advertisement for a workshop on "The Sacred Marriage" which promises to 'explore' the most primal forces: "Feminine energy: nurturing, authenticating, responding, allowing. Masculine energy: involving, manifesting, interacting, expanding. We will focus on the 9, which is the dance between masculine and feminine: the dance of gender, the Tao of spirituality ....Identifying the verbiage as "erotic fizz," Kennedy says, "This configuration, right out of the New Age movement, is nothing but McSpirituality, junk food for the soul."

Kennedy believes good people are drawn to New Age spirituality because the Roman Catholic Church has become mired in a hierarchical system that stifles spiritual growth.

"Ordinary Catholic men and women do not ask for much," he says. "They do, however, want to deepen their spiritual lives, and they crave sacramental rather than bureaucratic Catholicism. They are scandalized to be told that they may have to do without the Eucharist because the officials value the preservation of decaying structures over the provision of a truly renewed priestly ministry to them. Such conditions make understandable the extra-institutional groping and experimentation that define New Age and related shadowy facsimiles of sacramentally rooted and bolstered faith."