Adoremus Bulletin - July 2019 Issue by Adoremus Bulletin

Adoremus Bulletin For the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy

JULY 2019

News & Views

Vol. XXV, No. 1

Eternal Prayer in an Age of Technique: A Catholic Proposal for A Liturgical Apologetics

Holy See Confirms Changes to Italian Our Father, Gloria

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Vatican City (CNA)—The Apostolic See has confirmed the translation of the third edition of the Roman Missal prepared by the Italian bishops’ conference. The translation has garnered attention for its changes to the Our Father, as well as the Gloria. The newly-approved Messale Romano will translate the penultimate line of the Our Father (ne nos indúcas in tentatiónem) (lead us not into temptation) as “non abbandonarci alla tentazione” (do not abandon us to temptation). The existing version had translated it as “non ci indurre in tentazione” (lead us not into temptation). In the Gloria, the line “in térra pax homínibus bónae voluntátis” (on earth peace to people of good will) will be translated “pace in terra agli uomini, amati dal Signore” (peace on earth to men, loved by the Lord). It was translated “pace in terra agli uomini di buona volontà” (peace on earth to men of good will). The Italian bishops’ conference had approved the new edition of the Messale Romano during their November 2018 general assembly. The Apostolic See’s confirmation of the text was communicated during the conference’s meeting last month. News reports in English may have given the impression that Pope Francis had changed the Our Father for the whole of the Church, rather than his having confirmed a change made by the bishops of Italy. The new Italian text is a translation of the third edition of the Missale Please see TRANSLATION on next page

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By Hannah Brockhaus

If we are to perform liturgical apologetics, we must begin from the material. But this is not a task, writes Timothy O’Malley, “equivalent to the aesthete who likes old things. The goal is not to return to Palestrina because his music is old and thus sufficiently traditional for the liturgy. The end is not to recreate the frescos of Fra Angelico (an example, above) in every church. Instead, if one is to foster the singing of polyphony, it is because such music provides an encounter with radical materiality, with the contingency of sound itself. If we are to place frescos in churches, it is because such images enable the human person to see how his own flesh was involved in the process of salvation.”

By Timothy P. O’Malley

ir travelers are aware of a temptation endemic to the act of frequent flying. We grow used to the marvel of manned flight. As the plane ascends above terra firma, we put our headphones on, refusing to turn our eyes to the extraordinary landscape below us. A century ago, our ancestors would have marveled at our capacity to leave behind our earth-bound status, to survey creation from 20,000 feet. Our forebears used to perilous journeys across violent seas would have been awestruck at the ability to travel—with perhaps a bit of turbulence our only hindrance—from New York to London in six hours. We, on the other hand, perceive this act of flying as part of doing business. It is one of the techniques that we use to accomplish our work in the world. Human life is defined in our age, as sociologist Jacques Ellul recognized, by the proliferation of such technique. Most of us are not sufficiently attentive to the manner in which such technique is changing how we understand what it means to be a human being. The jetliner, the smartphone, and the Internet are not neutral technologies. The airplane has changed the way that we travel, allowing the human being to transcend

Adoremus Bulletin JULY 2019

temporal and spatial contingencies that once defined the human person. Nor are the smartphone and the Internet merely neutral instruments that we can use to navigate everything from the city’s grid of streets and avenues to the online information highway. Through both the smartphone and the Internet, once more, contingency disappears. All knowledge, all entertainment, through a supposed bird’s eye view, is now available to us. In essence, we have recreated ourselves as gods.

“ What happens when the salvific contingency of the Church’s liturgical life meets a culture with a seemingly infinite power to transcend time and space?” The Church, of course, has its own technologies—techniques through which the human person learns not to escape the world but to dwell contemplatively within it. Often, these ecclesial techniques intended to save us are at

least partially opposed to the technologies of our age. The liturgical act, for example, is not about escaping contingency. Instead, we who stand before the living God to offer a sacrifice of praise are embracing the salvific nature of our contingency. We are creatures, rather than the Creator. What we are capable of knowing, willing, and doing is limited. The Age of Technique But what happens when the salvific contingency of the Church’s liturgical life meets a culture with a seemingly infinite power to transcend time and space? Sacrosanctum Concilium presumed that the human person, who would perform the liturgical act, was aware of the precarity of his or her existence. We recognized ourselves as betwixt and between heaven and earth, situated within a world but made for contemplation of the invisible God become visible. The liturgy was to become the privileged ecclesial pedagogy by which we might come to terms with this “betweenness.” Sensible signs would lead us to contemplate the glories of the triune God through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. But now, over fifty years after the Council, we Please see APOLOGETICS on page 4

Apology Necessary Sorry to say, says Timothy O’Malley, but Catholics’ understanding of the liturgy is sorely lacking—and now more than ever the Church needs a liturgical apologetics................................ 1

Laying Down Tracks Adam Bartlett speaks with choral musician Matthew Curtis about how his venture Choral Tracks helps train the faithful in ancient music with the engine of modern technology............... 9

Words Down Under Looking at the well-versed genius of the late Australian poet Les Murray, Joseph O’Brien reads the life and works of this Catholic poet between the lines of the liturgy ............................ 3

Growing Mystery Father Philip-Michael Tangorra’s new book Holiness and the Sacramental Life, according to Brian Kranick, offers a solution to the mystery lacking in modernity............................................12

Big Church on Campus Amid the darkness of secular life at University of Wisconsin, Randall L. Milbrath and Matthew Alderman shine a light on the new St. Paul’s University Catholic Center.................................... 6

News & Views...................................................2 The Rite Questions....................................... 10 Donors & Memorials................................... 11

2 Continued from TRANSLATION, page 1 Romanum, the Latin typical edition which was issued in 2002. The existing Italian Messale Romano was a translation of the second edition of the Latin, which had been promulgated in 1975. The English translation of the third edition of the Missale Romanum was issued in 2011. A spokesman for the English and Welsh bishops has said that the International Commission on English in the Liturgy “is not currently considering the Lord’s Prayer,” and that “there are no plans at present for [the Our Father] to change in English,” but that “I am sure there will be some consultation with the Englishspeaking nations.” A spokesperson for the Scottish bishops said there were “no plans” to adopt the changes, while Bishop Francis Duffy of Ardagh and Clonmacnois, liturgy chair for the Irish bishops, said that “In consultation with bishops from other English-speaking countries, the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference will give close attention to the reported change to the Lord’s Prayer. The bishops will look at the implications for both the Irish and English translations of this much loved and universal prayer.” The change in the Italian translation was many years in the making. The revised version of the Our Father had been published in a version of the Bible approved by the Italian bishops’ conference in 2002, and published in 2008. The French bishops’ conference made a similar change to its translation of the Our Father. In 2017 it adopted a translation reading “ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation” (do not let us fall into temptation), whereas the former translation had read “ne nous soumets pas à la tentation” (lead us not into temptation). In January 2018, the German bishops’ conference chose against changing their translation of the Our Father to accord with the new trend. They noted “philosophical, exegetical, liturgical and, not least, ecumenical” reasons to leave the translation untouched, and added that the petition speaks of “the trust to be carried and redeemed by almighty God.” Though the new Italian translation of the Our Father was not Pope Francis’ “change,” he has several times been publicly critical of the way the petition “ne nos indúcas in tentatiónem” is translated in some languages. In an interview with Italian Catholic television network TV2000, Pope Francis lauded the French bishops’ decision, and he expressed concern that certain translations could give the impression it is God “who pushes me toward temptation to see how I fall.” More recently, Francis commented that “the original Greek expression contained in the Gospels is difficult to render exactly, and all modern translations are somewhat limping.” The Greek verb found in the Gospels, eisenenkēis, means to bring in, to lead in, to carry in, or to introduce. In his collation on the Our Father, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “Christ teaches us to pray, not that we may not be tempted, but that we may not be led into temptation. For it is when one overcomes temptation that one deserves the reward…. Our Lord, therefore, teaches us to pray that we be not led into temptation, by giving our consent to it,” because “it is human to be tempted, but to give consent is devilish.” “But does God lead one to evil, that he should pray: ‘Lead us not into temptation’? I reply that God is said to lead a person into evil by permitting him to the extent that, because of his many sins, He withdraws His grace from man, and as a result of this withdrawal man does fall into sin,” the Angelic Doctor wrote.

Bishop Paprocki Bars Pro-abortion Illinois Lawmakers from Holy Communion Springfield, IL (CNA)—The Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, has decreed that state legislative leaders may not be admitted to Holy Communion within his diocese, because of their work to pass the state Reproductive Health Act. The bishop also directed the Catholic legislators who have voted for legislation promoting abortion should not present themselves to receive Holy Communion until they have first gone to confession. “In accord with canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law..., Illinois Senate President John Cullerton and Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan, who facilitated the passage of the Act Concerning Abortion of 2017 (House Bill 40) as well as the Reproductive Health Act of 2019 (Senate Bill 25), are not to be admitted to Holy Communion in the Diocese of Spring-

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

NEWS & VIEWS field in Illinois because they have obstinately persisted in promoting the abominable crime and very grave sin of abortion as evidenced by the influence they exerted in their leadership roles and their repeated votes and obdurate public support for abortion rights over an extended period of time,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki wrote in a June 2 decree. “These persons may be readmitted to Holy Communion only after they have truly repented these grave sins and furthermore have made suitable reparation for damages and scandal, or at least have seriously promised to do so, as determined in my judgment or in the judgment of their diocesan bishop in consultation with me or my successor,” the bishop added. Illinois’ Reproductive Health Act was passed by the state’s House and Senate in early June, and observers credited the advocacy of Cullerton and Madigan with helping to secure passage. It is expected to be signed by Illinois’ Gov. J.B. Pritzker. The bill declares abortion to be a “fundamental right” in the state and would remove regulations on abortion clinics and doctors. Among the provisions that the bill would remove are regulations for abortion clinics, required waiting periods to obtain an abortion, and a ban on partialbirth abortion. In addition, it would lift criminal penalties for performing abortions and would prevent any further state regulation of abortion. The legislation would require all private health insurance plans to cover elective abortions, and eliminate reporting requirements as well as regulations requiring the investigation of maternal deaths due to abortion. Bishop Paprocki decree formally instructs priests and deacons in the Diocese of Springfield to refrain from administering the sacrament of the Eucharist to Cullerton and Madigan, both Catholics. The bishop also instructed other Catholic lawmakers not to approach Holy Communion, but did not prohibit priests from administering the sacrament to them. “I declare that Catholic legislators of the Illinois General Assembly who have cooperated in evil and committed grave sin by voting for any legislation that promotes abortion are not to present themselves to receive Holy Communion without first being reconciled to Christ and the Church in accord with canon 916 of the Code of Canon Law,” Bishop Paprocki wrote. In a statement issued June 6, the bishop said that “in issuing this decree, I anticipate that some will point out the Church’s own failings with regard to the abuse of children.” “The same justifiable anger we feel toward the abuse of innocent children, however, should prompt an outcry of resistance against legalizing the murder of innocent children. The failings of the Church do not change the objective reality that the murder of a defenseless baby is an utterly evil act. “We also understand many unplanned pregnancies come with fear and difficulty,” Bishop Paprocki acknowledged. “It is our obligation, as a society, to be there for these pregnant mothers, help them in any way possible, and empower them to make life affirming decisions. This also includes continued support for the mother and her child after birth. We must acknowledge a child in the womb is not a problem. He or she is a gift from God.” The bishop’s decree comes five months after a controversy surrounding New York’s Catholic governor Andrew Cuomo, who in January signed into law a bill that also dramatically expanded legal protection for abortion. While some Catholics called for New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan to excommunicate Cuomo—a canonical option most experts said was not technically possible—others encouraged the cardinal to formally prohibit Cuomo from receiving Holy Communion.

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Although Cardinal Dolan criticized Cuomo’s decision, he stopped short of issuing a decree prohibiting Cuomo from the Eucharist. The cardinal told reporters that decision would be counterproductive. For his part, Bishop Paprocki said that he issued the decree to encourage conversion. “As sacred Scripture warns, ‘Whoever eats unworthily of the bread and drinks from the Lord’s cup makes himself guilty of profaning the body and of the blood of the Lord.’ To support legislation that treats babies in the womb like property, allowing for their destruction for any reason at any time, is evil. It’s my hope and prayer these lawmakers reconcile themselves to the Church so they can receive Communion.” “The Eucharist is the most sacred aspect of our Catholic faith,” Bishop Paprocki added. In 2018, Bishop Paprocki said that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin would not be admitted to Holy Communion because of his advocacy for the legal protection of abortion. Bishop Paprocki’s statement recognized the Illinois lawmakers who had opposed the Reproductive Health Act. “I want to thank lawmakers who stood up to these barbaric pieces of legislation and voted ‘no,’ and I applaud their courage to speak the truth that the most basic right we should all enjoy, is the right to life.”

Order of Malta Restricts Use of Extraordinary Form Within Order By Hannah Brockhaus

ROME (CNA)—The recently installed head of the Knights of Malta has directed that all liturgical ceremonies within the community must use the ordinary, and not the extraordinary, form of the Roman rite. “I have thus decided, as supreme guarantor of the cohesion and communion of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem of which Providence made me Grand Master, that henceforth all the liturgical ceremonies within our Order must be performed according to the ordinary rite of the Church (rite of St. Paul VI) and not the extraordinary rite (Tridentine rite),” Fra’ Giacomo Dalla Torre wrote in a June 10 letter to the order. “This decision applies to all the official liturgical celebrations such as investitures, masses [sic] during our pilgrimages, memorial masses, [sic] as well as the feasts and solemnities of the Order.” Dalla Torre was elected grand master of the Knights of Malta in May 2018, after serving as interim leader for a little over a year. His appointment as interim grand master was part of ongoing reform of leadership after the Knights’ former grand master, Matthew Festing, resigned at Pope Francis’ request January 24, 2017. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a Catholic lay religious order originally founded as the Knights Hospitaller around 1099 in Jerusalem. Now based in Rome, it is present in 120 countries with over 2,000 projects in the medical-social field and more than 120,000 volunteers and medical staff. Dalla Torre said that as religious superior, it is his duty to ensure that “the communion that unites all the members of our religious family” is “present in every aspect of our Order’s life.” “Among all the elements which constitute our spiritual life, the question of the liturgy to use in our celebrations has a particular significance.” He wrote that “As you all know, Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificium, [sic] albeit leaving every priest the freedom to celebrate privately in an extraordinary form, nevertheless states that inside a religious institute the matter is to be decided by the Major Superior according to the norm of law and their particular statues (Summorum Pontificium, [sic] art. 3).” Summorum Pontificum states that “If communities of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of

Please see NEWS & VIEWS page 10 EDITOR - PUBLISHER: Christopher Carstens MANAGING EDITOR: Joseph O’Brien CONTENT MANAGER: Jeremy Priest GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Danelle Bjornson OFFICE MANAGER: Elizabeth Gallagher PHONE: 608.521.0385 WEBSITE: www.adoremus.org MEMBERSHIP REQUESTS & CHANGE OF ADDRESS: info@adoremus.org LETTERS TO THE EDITOR P.O. Box 385 La Crosse, WI 54602-0385 editor@adoremus.org

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE The Rev. Jerry Pokorsky = Helen Hull Hitchcock The Rev. Joseph Fessio, SJ

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

Has the Liturgical Movement Turned Itself Around? By Christopher Carstens, Editor

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ather Pius Parsch occupied a key place in the 20th century liturgical movement, with an influence that continues to be seen and felt today. An Austrian pastor following World War I until his death in 1954, Father Parsch opened the treasures of the liturgy and the Bible to his people. His Masses were preceded with the communal praying of the Divine Office, and themselves included liturgical chanting by the people, ample use of candles, bells, and incense, while maintaining the silent Canon. These elements, he claimed, were means of grace for his people, and they would make “the heart-beat of the parish’s body of grace become audible,” he wrote in 1947. What’s discernable in Parsch, and to a greater or lesser degree the modern liturgical movement as a whole, is a two-directional movement. The first of these two directions is a movement of the people toward the liturgy. In a popular liturgical journal from 1929, an unidentified priest explained the liturgical movement to his brother priests: “The Liturgical Movement, as the words indicate, is a movement—a movement towards the liturgy.” Another liturgical leader, St. Louis’s Father Martin Hellreigel (who wrote the hymn, “To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King”), wrote similarly that same year: “As the words show, the liturgical movement is a movement towards the liturgy, towards the ‘fountains of the Savior,’ towards the Christlife-imparting mysteries of our holy faith.” Like these and so many other figures of that age, Parsch formed his people and led them to the heart of the liturgical mystery. A prolific publisher, Parsch’s periodicals Live with the Church and The Church’s Year of Grace reached thousands of laity around the world. The second and subsequent direction of the liturgical movement, also exemplified by Parsch, saw the rites move towards the people. Just a year after Pope Pius XII’s 1947 liturgical encyclical, Mediator Dei, the Holy Father established a commission to consider ritual reform. In 1951, the Holy See offered the possibility of celebrating a revised ritual for the Easter Vigil. Four years later, in 1955, Pius XII decreed a simplification of the liturgical calendar and many rubrics, while 1955 also witnessed the reform of the entire Holy Week liturgy. As one commentator rightly predicted in 1947, Mediator Dei signaled “the beginning of a new stage” in the liturgical apostolate (see Alcuin Reid’s book, The Organic Development of the Liturgy [Ignatius Press, 2005] for more along these lines). To give another example of the liturgical movement’s concern for suitable rites, a 1960 book by Father H.A. Reinhold bore the title, Bringing the Mass to the People. In his own parish, Parsch did just

A key objective of the 20th century Liturgical Movement helped the faithful to see the reality behind every ritual and sacramental element (namely, the paschal sacrifice of Jesus) and then to move deeper into that same mystery.

that — bringing the Mass to his flock by employing licit liturgical options, such as celebrating at a free-standing altar, having readings and prayers announced in German, and reviving the offertory procession with gifts. Thus, the modern liturgical movement “moves” in two directions: it moves the people to the liturgy, and it moves the liturgy to the people. And it is “right and just” that it do so, for Jesus himself (the substance of the liturgy) moved toward us in his incarnation so that we, his people, can move to and through him to the Father. Still, we can safely characterize the movement’s first 75 years (from Dom Prosper Gueranger [d.1875] to Mediator Dei) as emphasizing the movement of the people, and its second 75 years (from Mediator Dei until now) as stressing the change of the rites. But where are we today? And where ought we go tomorrow? Where ought our energies work—do we continue to allow the liturgy to change us or do we continue to change the rites? Some say the liturgical movement has turned one-

sidedly back to the past; others suggest that it is still spinning out of control; others have lost interest. I wonder if the liturgical movement has turned itself around (so to speak) and come full circle. The liturgy is a living thing, more like an organism than an object, an entity that forms and is formed to a degree by those who use it. Thus it changes like the living cells who receive its life. At the same time, the liturgy sets an objective standard for me: the liturgy—that organism with roots extending even back to the dawn of time—asks more movement from me than I ask from it. Put another way, Jesus (and, by extension, his liturgy) has become like me, but only so that I can become like him. Indeed, the importance of these twin movements in the liturgy reveals the danger of mistaking the liturgy as a movement for its own sake rather than as a means to our ultimate destiny—union with God here and now and in heaven hereafter. After 75 years of ritual flux, the minds, hearts, and souls of many look for stability. One considerable mind in particular called for this same stability. Pope Benedict, witness to both directions of the modern movement, wrote The Spirit of the Liturgy, in part, “to encourage, in a new way, something like a ‘liturgical movement,’ a movement toward the liturgy and toward the right way of celebrating the liturgy, inwardly and outwardly” (8-9). In his words, we hear echoes of the 1920 movement. The liturgy, Benedict says, is a “given” toward which we move. More recently, many restless Catholic minds, hearts, and souls surfaced on social media after the USCCB asked via Twitter: “If you are a young Catholic who is still Catholic, what has made you stay?” Replies were manifold, but, as one might expect, many responses emphasized the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, and traditional elements in the liturgy. But one reply that caught my eye seems to speak to the trajectory of today’s liturgical movement: “Key to it all, in my opinion: don’t try to ‘get young people back.’ Preach Christ Crucified in the Sacraments to all, with a passion for evangelization and service, and all generations will flock to the Church. Focusing on young people feels too much like pandering” (Justiñ White @jaywhyte85). This year, the Church remembers the 50th Anniversary of the Novus Ordo Missal. Perhaps not by coincidence, 2019 also marks Adoremus’s 25th birthday. Adoremus Bulletin has encouraged both authentic celebrations of the rite and also fruitful participation by the people, and we’ll continue to do so into the future. But the time seems to be upon us to appreciate more clearly the objective and given nature of the rite—and the subjective and ephemeral circumstances of those who use it. May the liturgy move us more than we desire to move it. For the liturgy is meant to lead us earthly pilgrims ever more closely to our eternal home.

A Play on Words: The Intersection of Poetry and Liturgy in the Works of Les Murray By Joseph O’Brien, Managing Editor

ground in that which defines both—words.

“April is the cruelest month,” says T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, invoking through poetry the violent springtime transition from death to life—and, in Christ’s paschal mystery, the equally violent transition from life to death to life again. This past April has been particularly cruel to poetry with the passing of Australian poet Les Murray, one of the great voices of modern verse. Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 into poverty on his grandparents’ farm in Bunyah, New South Wales in southeastern Australia (the same farm to which he returned in 1985 to live and work out his days). Wellread as a child, and bullied for it in school, Murray transformed what he read and what he experienced into world-renowned verse. Nicknamed the “Bush-bard,” Murray produced nine volumes of poetry—many of them award-winning, including his 1996 collection, Subhuman Redneck Poems, which received the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Murray died on April 29, but for lovers of poetry and lovers of liturgy, Murray leaves behind a body of work that deserves study—and demonstrates the close relationship that human verse and holy rites share. Murray’s writings—which included several volumes of lyric poems, verse novels, memoirs, and critical essays—transcended time and place even as Murray remained faithful to a vision that sprang in equal parts from the lush yet rugged Australian landscape and a fertile Catholic imagination cultivated by the poet’s love for Christ, especially as he encountered him in the Mass.

Religions are poems. They concert Our daylight and dreaming mind, our Emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

Religion and the Poet Critics have noticed an affinity between Murray’s poetry

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Into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words And nothing’s true that figures in words only.

Catholic, sacramental poet, Les Murray (1938-2019)

“ I was wowed and fascinated by the sacramental bridge between earth and heaven that Catholicism offered.” and that of Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and Anglican poets T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill, all of whom focused their considerable poetic talents within a religious and liturgical context. Raised a Protestant, at age 26, Murray converted to Catholicism around the time that his poetic talents were burgeoning. Of particular interest to Catholic readers is the relationship Murray sees between poetry and religion. Critics often cite his poem “Religion and Poetry” as Murray’s manifesto for this relationship. Even in the opening lines of the poem, Murray sees religion and poetry finding common

For Murray, the words of a poem and the words of prayer—verse and liturgy—share an important trait: they express the inexpressible and bring those who speak them closer to the truth of things as they appear in the world. In either case, poetry or religion, though, a word by itself has no life, and no poem or religion can exist without words to express it. Indeed, Murray recognizes that any attempt to embrace the mystery of being itself must include words—words only given life through expression. For the poet, this amounts to a sort of personal set of sacraments (communicated through metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech) that truly present and represent that mystery to the world. On the other hand, religion—and the Catholic Church in particular—expresses this mystery through the sacramental patrimony bestowed by Christ. In fact, it was this same liturgical power to see the world as a reflection of and participation in the divine which first drew Murray to the faith both poetically and personally: “I was wowed and fascinated by the sacramental bridge between earth and heaven that Catholicism offered,” he says in an interview with Image Journal, “by the doctrine of the real presence, by that total Please see MURRAY on page 8

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019 fascism would naturally fall away. But the Council Fathers and implementers were not entirely correct. They presumed that the modern, late modern, or postmodern person would happily give himself or herself over to the liturgical technology of the Church if it were easily understood. If the Mass were in English, if the repetition of the prayers were eliminated, if we used the right music that people liked, then social transformation would follow from liturgical participation. But now, not only do we still suffer the effects of secularization, racism, and radical secularization, we also have a declining participation in the sacramental life of the Church. In many parishes, the various forms of social malaise that the liturgy hoped to end have actually seeped into the liturgy itself. The naivety of many of the reformers and implementers of the Council is not a nefarious one. Rather, it was derived from a confusion about how liturgical prayer functions. Liturgies, whether one is speaking about the Eucharist or infant baptism, do not simply function as a “communication” of theological, spiritual, or moral principles by means of ritual performance. This theory of ritual, offered first by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, remains entrenched in those involved in the task of liturgical formation. If only we get the ritual system right, then we’ll communicate the proper theological knowledge to the participant. AB/WIKIMEDIA

“ Liturgies, whether one is speaking For St. Augustine, depicted here being instructed by the Christ Child about the futility of atabout the Eucharist tempting to fully understand with a finite mind the infinite mystery of God, any liturgical act or infant baptism, do requires a deeper seeking than a mere communication of knowledge, a union of wisdom and worship unique to the Christian imagination. not simply function as Continued from APOLOGETICS, page 1 the human need for a concrete, existing a ‘communication’ of person to enter into one’s life. We want can escape our contingency, our location someone to be there when we’re sick in time and space, even our very senses theological, spiritual, with the stomach bug or experiencing through an endless supply of streamthe loss of a parent. But all we have is a or moral principles ing videos on Netflix. We don’t need the like or a favorite. liturgy because we have created other by means of ritual pedagogies that enable us to deal with The Liturgical Response human contingency. performance.” The recognition that we cannot save ourselves from the dread that we experience as fallen creatures offers the possibility of a new liturgical apologetics. After the Council, there was a naivety among both the liturgical reformers and the implementers. They believed that if liturgical prayer were offered in the vernacular, if it were comprehensible to the human eye and ear, then social malaises would disappear. Through a reformed liturgy, secularization, individualism, racism, and

St. Augustine was aware that this approach to liturgical formation is insufficient. Singing a psalm with fervor, getting lost in the drama of salvation at the Paschal Vigil—these moments of wonder must become an object of contemplation and then moral attunement. We are to sing the psalm, to perceive how we may be accustomed to its melody in our own

The Shape of Liturgical Apologetics If one is to perform this liturgical apologetics, we must begin from the material. Once again, this task is not equivalent to the aesthete who likes old things. The goal is not to return to Palestrina because his music is old and thus sufficiently traditional for the liturgy. The end is not to recreate the frescos of Fra Angelico in every church. Instead, if one

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While the fathers of the liturgical movement, particularly Romano Guardini, understood the risk of technology for misshaping the spiritual destiny of the human person, there was no way for them to envision the speed through which this revolution would unfold. It’s a big leap from the advent of factories on the shores of Lake Como (where Guardini wrote a series of contemplative letters on man’s place in the universe in an increasingly technological age) to commercial air flight, human reproductive technologies in which we can create life in laboratories, and the Internet in which all human knowledge and entertainment is available at our fingertips. Chastened in the years immediately following World War II and the program of genocide enacted by Hitler, we recognized that human progress had its perilous limits. But memory is short. And many young men and women believe that our salvation from ecological devastation, social violence, and even natural human death is really a matter of technological innovation. This attitude is best summed up in a recent political slogan: “Yes, we can.” But can we? At present, one gets a sense that despite our persistent effort to disremember our precarity, our contingency intervenes. Emerging adults between the ages of 18-23 are experiencing loneliness, as they discover that the supposed infinite possibility for human communion via social media is, well, not enough. They turn to dating apps like Tinder, looking for an anonymous person to swipe right, feeling for a moment the thrill that one is desired. But such virtual communion cannot quench

lives. We are to shape our existence in light of this psalm, making the desire of the Psalmist our own. We are to become what we behold, discovering a way of life through liturgical performance. For St. Augustine, any liturgical act requires a deeper seeking, a union of wisdom and worship unique to the Christian imagination. Of course, in the post-conciliar era, we’ve also destroyed the wondrous things to behold that might lead to worshipful wisdom—cult seeking understanding. Because too many implementers of liturgical reform sought to turn the liturgy into the communication of a novel theology, a new ecclesiology, we performed an act of iconoclasm that eliminated the iconic, sonic, and spatial beauty that marked the Catholic imagination. The material culture of the liturgy was reduced to its functionality. Form disappeared. A critique of this iconoclasm in the post-conciliar era is not just the complaint of the traditionalist. Instead, it is the awareness that if we really want to have liturgical wisdom, then we must also have something worth contemplating in the first place. As I never tire of telling my students, matter matters. Matter matters because we discover that it is precisely in that which is most contingent, the most material, that the Word has become flesh. A space emptied of all images of Christ reduces salvation to a verbal proclamation, an “idea” that now transcends materiality. If liturgical music is merely meant to communicate a message, then once one has grasped the idea, why chant? Why sing? A liturgical apologetics will need to offer an apologia to a culture that imagines that the human person is capable of escaping contingency. But it will need to do so not through a liturgy that “communicates” some abstract idea to the participant. Instead, it will seek to begin from that which is material and sensible, and only then move to a wisdom that can assist the human person in living as a creature betwixt and between heaven and earth.

Emerging adults between the ages of 18-23 are experiencing loneliness, as they discover that the supposed infinite possibility for human communion via social media is, well, not enough.

AB/WIKIMEDIA

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

Sacrosanctum Concilium presumed that the human person, who would perform the liturgical act, was aware of the precarity of his or her existence. We recognized ourselves as betwixt and between heaven and earth, situated within a world but made for contemplation of the invisible God become visible. The liturgy was to become the privileged ecclesial pedagogy by which we might come to terms with this “betweenness.” Sensible signs would lead us to contemplate the glories of the triune God through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch.

is to foster the singing of polyphony, it is because such music provides an encounter with radical materiality, with the contingency of sound itself. If we are to place frescos in churches, it is because such images enable the human person to see how his own flesh was involved in the process of salvation. For example, the frequent use of incense in churches is not a matter of being a “traditionalist.” Rather, incense is that material object that involves the human sensation of smell in the act of salvation. It involves sight because we perceive the manner in which this smoke ascends to heaven, transfixed by the light of stained glass windows. A liturgical apologetics will begin through a proliferation of the material culture that was once integral to liturgical prayer. In 2016, I invited students in my courses to encounter the St. John’s Bible. In encountering this hand-written, illuminated manuscript of the Gospels, the students recognized the gift of material culture in the liturgy. They saw the power of contingency in the Christian unfolding of salvation. Here was a text written by means of a human hand. Here was a text illuminated by images. The Scriptures ceased being a repository of mere ideas that each student could accept or reject. Instead, the Scriptures became a material object available to human contemplation. The effort put into constructing this material object was obvious to the students. Part of this liturgical apologetics will involve a reconsideration of the use of art within churches. Too many ecclesial spaces have been designed with almost no attention to the human body. They

are sparse spaces, empty of statuary, without mosaics, without any image of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. The more these churches take up the human form, the more they provide the worshipper with an image of the salvific quality to human contingency. Jesus Christ is

worship to God outside of the liturgical act. They can wonder at the wondrous God through a Sunday hike or a brunch of bottomless mimosas with friends. An apologia for praise will begin from the contingency of the human person. It will depart from the feeling of many men

“ Salvation does not involve escaping the human condition. Rather, the more we enter into what it means to be human, to dwell between birth and death, the more capable we will be to worship the Triune God.” not an abstract idea but the Word who became an infant, who preached to sinners, who died on the cross, and who was raised from the dead. Salvation does not involve escaping the human condition. Rather, the more we enter into what it means to be human, to dwell between birth and death, the more capable we will be to worship the Triune God. Yet, a liturgical apologetics is not reducible to the restoration of material culture. Liturgical formation will also need to offer an apologia for the liturgical act, one that demonstrates how cultic activity can provide a form of life that enables one to dwell in the world as a contingent being. We need a liturgical philosophy in addition to a liturgical aesthetics. Consider the activity of praise. Many of those who have ceased attending the liturgy have done so because they don’t feel the need to engage in an act of Eucharistic praise within the Church. They don’t understand why such liturgical praise is necessary, for they can certainly offer

The Liturgical Movement to God AB/CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT

By Robert Cardinal Sarah Editor’s note: The following excerpt is taken from Cardinal Robert Sarah’s booklength interview God or Nothing (Ignatius Press, 2015), pages 125-6, and is used with permission. Nicholas Diat: Benedict XVI often insisted that the liturgy was a moment when divine realities descended into the life of men. How do you understand this perspective?

“The liturgy,” says Cardinal Robert Sarah, “is a great door that opens onto God and allows us symbolically to step beyond the walls of this world.”

Cardinal Sarah: The liturgy is a moment when God, out of love, desires to be in profound union with men. If we truly experience these sacred moments, we can encounter God. We must not fall into the trap that tries to reduce the liturgy to a simple place of fraternal convivial-

ity. There are plenty of other places in life in which to enjoy each other’s company. The Mass is not a place where men meet in a trivial spirit of festivity. The liturgy is a great door that opens onto God and allows us symbolically to step beyond the walls of this world. The Holy Mass

and women that there is something missing in their lives. They escape loneliness through entering into an endless stream of Tweets. They avoid communion through meaningless hook-ups made possible through dating apps, all the while longing for something more. Each of these actions presumes that the human person can achieve flourishing on his or her own. We can escape contingency. But the act of liturgical praise offers another way. There is nothing that we can do to achieve flourishing on our own. We are creatures. This means that we are intrinsically contingent. We can’t create a piece of art that will transcend our brevity. We are unable to enter into an earthly relationship that will escape death. The brevity of our loves and our lives is part of what it means to be human. In the act of praise, we recognize this. We are creatures, who cannot escape death. The only thing we can do is to turn toward God. This turning toward God is not escaping from our contingency, an

must be treated with dignity, beauty, and respect. The celebration of the Eucharist requires first a great silence, a silence inhabited by God. It is necessary to pay attention to the material circumstances in order for this encounter to take place fruitfully. I am thinking, for example, of the dignity and exemplary character of the liturgical vestments and furnishing. The place where Mass is celebrated must be marked with a beauty that can foster recollection and encounter with God. Benedict XVI contributed much to the Church in reflecting on the meaning of the liturgy. His book The Spirit of the Liturgy is the fruit of mature theological thinking. If the liturgy becomes impoverished and loses its sacred character, it becomes a sort of profane space. We live now in an era that is intensely seeking what is sacred; but because of a

impoverished understanding of salvation as “transcending” space and time. Rather, in liturgical praise we offer our contingency over to God. God is God, worthy of the highest praise. Through this praise, we discover what it means to be human. We are made for adoration. Therefore, a liturgical apologetics that will heal our almost gnostic obsession with technique will need to attend to both material culture, as well as to a liturgical philosophy that perceives in the rites of the Church wisdom for what it means to be a human being. It is not enough to simply excoriate absent members of the Church to perform their Sunday duty. For, we have lost a sense that such action has anything to do with our salvation at all, since after all, we seem capable of saving ourselves. But, we can’t. And a liturgical apologetics in our age will face this faulty understanding of salvation head on. It will invite us to wonder, to recognize that we are creatures before something that is worth beholding. It will invite us to “become” what we “behold.” And it will do so through a liturgical philosophy that unites wisdom and worship, showing men and women how the liturgical act is not obligatory. But, it’s a technique, perhaps the only technique, that will lead to happiness. Timothy P. O’Malley is the academic director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, University of Notre Dame. He teaches and researches in liturgicalsacramental theology, theological aesthetics, and catechesis. sort of dictatorship of subjectivism, man would like to confine the sacred to the realm of the profane. The best example of this is when we create new liturgies, the result of more or less artistic experiments, that do not allow any encounter with God. We claim somewhat arrogantly to remain in the human sphere so as to enter into the divine. ND: For many years now, it seems that the liturgy has been divided, so to speak, along the lines of two different schools that are even opposed: the classical and the modern. What do you think? CS: The liturgy is God’s time, and it tends to become the heart of an ideological pitched battle between different concepts. It is sad to enter God’s house with one’s shoulders loaded with weapons of war and one’s heart filled with hatred. If

Please see SARAH, page 10

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

The Light Shines in the Darkness: The New St. Paul University Catholic Center in Madison, Wisconsin

AB/RDG PLANNING & DESIGN

St. Paul’s University Catholic Center, the student parish for University of Wisconsin-Madison, is sited on a prominent but constricted urban lot on the pedestrian portion of State Street, Madison’s liveliest student thoroughfare.

little over a year ago, liturgical scholar Denis McNamara was standing near a construction site on busy State Street in downtown Madison, WI, watching a team of Italian craftsmen on scaffolding install a gigantic mosaic, its gold shimmering in the afternoon light. It, and the new building it adorned, had already begun to cause a stir in the college town. Some new students assumed the neo-Romanesque structure had always been there. One wag on Twitter dubbed it “Loveseat Jesus” in reference to its two gigantic figures of Christ and Mary seated together on a throne, patterned after the apse mosaic at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, which depicts the Coronation of the Virgin in Heaven. A passer-by approached Professor McNamara and asked him what it was. He explained it was the new St. Paul’s University Catholic Center, the student parish for University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Hmm,” said the man, pausing. “Maybe I’ll go back to church.” The mosaic and the new Italo-Byzantine-style student center, a stately composition in striped red brick and white cast stone, are the newest incarnation of the oldest Catholic campus ministry in the United States. It replaces a monotone 1968 structure in the Brutalist manner, itself an expansion and renovation of the first Gothic church built on the site in 1909. A few remnants of the original building remained embedded in the later structure, but only as architectural ghosts. In one form or another, Catholics have ministered to students at the university since Thanksgiving Day, 1883, often meeting in private homes. St. Paul’s became the first Catholic chapel at a secular university in the United States and gave birth to what would grow into the worldwide Newman movement, which through the establishment of Newman Centers was designed to serve Catholics on secular college campuses. Ever Ancient, Ever New While located in the pedestrian heart of

downtown Madison, on the threshold of campus, the existing facility was a crazyquilt of construction methods and historical periods. The concrete hulk of the church featured a gloomy, ill-lit interior and a somewhat idiosyncratic antiphonal seating arrangement. The student center proper was a Victorian house hiding behind a neo-Gothic screen, a warren of stairs and pokey meeting rooms. Everything seemed to be on a split level. Yet students kept coming. Finally, after nearly a decade of planning and design, the outdated, aging buildings were demolished. The new St. Paul’s is a six-story facility centered on a new chapel, student center, dining, classrooms/lecture rooms, and living quarters for students. Father Eric Nielsen, the center’s pastor and executive director, wanted a building that was “first inviting to students, and second that there is most likely a Catholic church inside of it,” in contrast with the previous structure, which featured a conspicuously bare façade. The new face of the Center is the re-

sult of a close collaboration between the present writers Randall Milbrath, firm senior partner for the project’s lead architect, RDG Planning & Design, and liturgical design consultant Matthew Alderman of Matthew Alderman Studios. Alderman provided design concepts for the overall exterior, the chapel, and the chapel’s liturgical furnishings. The exterior mosaic was designed by Irish artist Donal McManus, and the interior chapel development was executed by EverGreene Architectural Arts (Emily Sottile) and Wood Specialties (David Fitzpatrick) and constructed by the capable hands of CG Schmidt Construction led by Eric Schmidt. St. Paul’s is sited on a prominent but constricted urban lot on the pedestrian portion of State Street, Madison’s liveliest student thoroughfare. The architects looked to both ecclesiastical structures and academic buildings of higher learning from the Romanesque revival of the first quarter of the 20th century. The new building expresses these precedents

in an architectural “new traditionalism” combining ancient Catholic forms with a modern energy, serving as a potent outward manifestation of the Catholic faith’s roots. Study in Beauty The building’s ground floor holds the student center and study areas, with the chapel on the second and third floor, and student living, offices, dining and lecture halls are located on the floor above that. The whole complex rises up to an octagonal cupola inspired by examples in Rome, Florence, and Ravenna. Due to the tight urban street front, the building is encountered from a variety of angles, both as a whole and in individual vignettes. The experience of it at street level in front, with the prominent mosaic and arcaded pediment above, is wholly different from the initial glimpse of its copper spire. The new church is packed with student Masses every Sunday, and young men and women often slip in during the day at quiet moments for prayer and

AB/RDG PLANNING & DESIGN

By Randall L. Milbrath and Matthew Alderman

Ogran and choir loft.

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Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

Gallery artwork surrounding the nave.

meditation. “The students have been very receptive to the building,” Father Nielsen said. “They find it very warm and inviting. Student engagement is much higher now than in the past because of [its] attractiveness,” At the Center’s heart, both in spirit and in structure, lies the chapel, colorful, iconographically expressive, and luminously lit. The Italo-Byzantine style of the exterior had already been decided early in the design of the building, and blended well with Father Nielsen’s growing immersion in the world of ancient Christianity as a result of teaching a special summer school for seminarians in Italy called The Rome Experience. Matthew Alderman from the design team was able to join him during his time in Rome and document and measure the 7th-century basilica of Sant’ Agnese Fuori le Mura, the proportions and size of which proved to match almost exactly the space available for the new chapel. The colonnade and flat-coffered ceiling of St. Agnes served as potent inspirations. Pre-existing structural requirements meant that every third column had to be replaced with a larger pier, but this added a welcome degree of syncopation to the design. Faithful Depiction The new church is inspired by Roman originals, but it is anything but a copy and includes its own unique iconographic scheme celebrating both the

life of Christ and St. Paul alternately in a series of bas-reliefs running along the upper nave, and the images of youthful saints in mosaic rondels just above the aisle capitals. The apse is ornamented with an interlacing pattern of books and swords, representing St. Paul, and peacocks drinking from a chalice, an ancient Christian symbol of immortality. The unusual superimposition of classical orders on the gallery spaces suggest a narrative of wisdom and age (represented by the more ancient Ionic order) watching over youthful exuberance (represented by the Corinthian order, which is more recent relative to the Ionic). The blend of styles also playfully acknowledges that Early Christian architecture was seldom systematic in its use of classical elements. The remainder of the structure is full of similar thoughtful touches. Many hands contributed to the completion of this great structure and produced a harmonious whole that is now becoming a muchloved home for the Catholic students of UW-Madison and a beacon to the surrounding community. Randall Milbrath noted that a guiding principle for the team was found in Proverbs 15:22, “Without counsel, plans go wrong, but with many advisors they succeed.” Like student life itself, the long road to completing St. Paul’s had both its light moments and its struggles. Finally, in November 2017, the chapel was dedicated by the late Bishop Robert C. Morlino, who had been particularly supportive of the Center’s construction. Remembering that support, Randall said, “For me, St. Paul University Catholic Center is a place that truly engages in the debate of faith and reason. Sharing the Catholic perspective with the surrounding university community in a winsome manner that is all too often missing today. It inspired all of us throughout this project.” Darkness and Light As night falls on State St. in Madison, the mosaic of the Coronation of Mary still glimmers, floodlit from below. From this perspective, any passing student can glimpse the inscription from Matthew 11:18 etched above the Center’s portals: “Come to Me, all you who labor and

are burdened, and I will give you rest.” The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

than 50 church projects and brings key project leadership and connection throughout the design process.

Randall Milbrath is a Senior Partner and architect at RDG Planning & Design. He brings 30 years of professional experience to his clients including programming, design, and project management. He has spent the past 25 years working primarily on sacred architecture projects for a variety of faith communities. He has presented at church and liturgical conferences on topics from art and environment to overcoming the physical challenges that naturally occur in the architectural design or renovation of churches. He has led more

Matthew Alderman, KM is a liturgical designer, sacred artist, and heraldic illustrator based in Concord, MA. A graduate of Notre Dame’s classical architecture program, his designs grace churches in the American Midwest, South Carolina, and Vladivostok, Russia. In 2016, he was invested as a knight of magistral grace in the Order of Malta. He now serves as project designer for the venerable church building firm of Cram and Ferguson Architects in Concord, MA. His personal website is matthewalderman.com.

The sanctuary's wooden ambo.

AB/RDG PLANNING & DESIGN

Chapel nave and sanctuary.

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

Continued from MURRAY, page 3 defiance of austerity and meanness of spirit.” In his own poetry, Murray adapts and adopts this “sacramental bridge.” Religion, we can understand Murray to mean, contains the mystery of being—and so does poetry, however imperfectly: Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition; Like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete With terms where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

“ God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned.” Poetry at Play This same mixture of the earthly and heavenly that set fire to Murray’s poetic imagination also helped him find his poetic voice. Deeply indebted to another wellknown Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Murray honed his ability to find in the simplest things of creation the deep swell and flow of divine mystery. “He taught me how to do baroque diction, how to melt language and model tableaux in it,” Murray tells Image. “I taught myself later on how to do this under cover. You gave your work a factual plain surface and worked the baroque and the rococo underneath, so that you and your readers were free of the tyranny of modern ‘no nonsense’ pretensions.” Murray’s explanation is as good a description of his style as we will find. In all of his poems, the “no nonsense” and practical serve as a foil for the playfulness of words. In this way, Murray very much subscribes to a notion of art that Romano Guardini describes in The Spirit of the Liturgy. “The work of art has no purpose, but it has meaning—‘ut sint’—that it should exist, and that it should clothe in clear and genuine form the essence of things and the inner life of the human artist” (translated by Ada Lane [New York: Herder, 1998], 64). Typifying the sort of local “nonsense” found in the Bush-bard’s verse, Murray’s poem “The Broad Bean Sermon” presents a poem bereft of purpose as the world knows purpose, but bulging with meaning. Ostensibly, “Sermon” is a poem about a gardener’s stroll through his bean rows; but it also captures the essence of the sacramental, recalling Eden, the fall, and heaven in less than 30 lines: “Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade/ without belief,” he begins the poem. He is less than hopeful that the crop, left literally blowing in the wind, will fulfill its promise. But the longer the bean-picker lingers in his garden, attends Adam-like to stewarding creation, the more he sees the beans in a new light— that is, in the changing yet nurturing light of day. In fact, the flaccid congregation on the vine become beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice that the noon glare or cloud-light of afternoon slants will uncover till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or do they form in an hour? Unfolding into reality like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly, the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers…. In the end, we realize, not the poet but the beans are providing the “Sermon.” Look at the world, they seem to say, and see that it is perhaps a world full of beans— but if you are willing to cooperate with God and nature, you can see that these are beans very much alive with being.

Meaning and Purpose Cooperating with the meaning of things—beans, crickets, cows, the entire catalog of nature—was very much to Murray’s purpose as a poet. As David Mason notes, such cooperation stood as a foundation for Murray’s métier. He was, Mason writes, “a religious poet devoted

“ Murray had a profound responsiveness to images and the sacredness of words, which paved the way, in his germinating Catholic imagination, for a sense of sacramental reality.” to creation,” but it was a devotion, Mason notes, which was colored by the concrete and individual. “His wordscapes and landscapes were local, Australian, with everything that distinction signifies—including the transported convict’s sense of justice and the nation’s thoroughly multicultural heritage,” Mason writes. “His art wasn’t bound by pieties, political or otherwise, because he understood the position of poetry—and of language itself—in relation to reality.” To find this relation, poetry must drill down to the particulars: to the fleshy beans waggling in a breeze. In so doing, the poet finds the essence of things—because that’s what makes poetry work in the first place. “No ideas but in things,” says another Catholic poet, William Carlos Williams—although Murray would no doubt add a lemma to this proposition: Things are never inert but spring with life from the font of all being—the incarnational Christ. Murray, says Karl Schmude, “had a profound responsiveness to images and the sacredness of words, which paved the way, in his germinating Catholic imagination, for a sense of sacramental reality—of the visible embodying the invisible; of the material being fulfilled in the spiritual; of the Word made Flesh, so that language itself became a channel of divine communion, not just an instrument of human communication.” The first Word was the last word for Murray, when it came to his own poetic sensibilities—and Murray found that same “wowing” (a favorite nonsense word for the seriously playful Murray) that brought him into the Church most intensely and most concretely through his love for the Eucharist: “I was fascinated by the idea of the Eucharist,” Murray says, quoted by Schmude. “It absolutely wowed me. Anybody who’s interested in imagery has to be interested in that type of fusion, metaphor taken all the way to identity.” Many critics rightly see Murray’s poem “Religion and Poetry” as a sort of manifesto for this sacramental vision. But if “Religion and Poetry” observes the affinities of composition and belief, it is another Murray poem, “The Say-but-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary,” which places us front and center before the reality of that relationship as it unfolds in the penultimate moment of human history—the crucifixion which serves as prelude to Christ’s resurrection. T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi,” reimagines the first epiphany of

AB/WIKIMEDIA

The power to draw men to this mystery and recite it “in loving repetition” is the domain of poetry and liturgy at once, and “like any poem,” religion must be diverse in meaning yet wholly contained. God and the poem and the reader are one—and so too God and the believer and liturgy are one. At least that’s the goal of each, and in either case, we perceive a great gift: in Murray’s poetry, it involves our natural ability to see the mystery of being through the imperfection of language; in the sacred liturgy, it involves the supernatural grace that allows the limitless God to be enclosed within the tabernacle of a prayer or submissive to the efficacious words of consecration, while remaining free to work on drawing us closer to him. Indeed, later in the poem Murray proclaims, “God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned.”

Christ’s birth, from the perspective of the Three Wise Men fumbling their way to the crib in Bethlehem after a long, arduous journey from the East; and so too, serving as another unsuspecting witness, Murray’s centurion asking Christ to enter under his roof (and recalling for the reader that other centurion who recognized Christ’s healing power at the foot of the cross) attests to a final earthly epiphany at Christ’s death.

That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox has died a slave’s death. We were maneuvered into it by priests and by the man himself. To complete his poem. He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message unwritten except on his body, like anyone’s, was wrapped like a scroll and dispatched to our liberated selves, the gods. This poem, we can imagine, is Murray participating in Mass—understanding the paradox of death-in-life and life-in-death, both re-presented on the altar (Recall that the “Domine, non sum dignus” which we recite immediately before receiving communion is derived from the centurion’s words to Christ). But within the poem at hand, that same event is presented as if for the first time, fresh and alive as the beans in his “Sermon”—and like the beans, the crucifixion event spills out beyond the particular moment, as the day once again progresses toward the noon hour—and the three hours of angry clouds that follow: Death came through the sight of law. His people’s oldest wisdom. If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable in language of death’s era, there will be wars about religion as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians. Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died for you before you meet it, may seem colder than the favor of gods, who are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby. The altars to our own “gods,” as Murray suggests, have been constructed from original sin and installed with our own personal sins, and will remain as long as humans resist grace; but through Murray’s sublime genius, the centurion sees—and helps us see—on the cross not only the horror of our sins but the innocence of that child who was born to abolish these old gods of sinfulness. Here as elsewhere in his writings, Les Murray’s poetic genius worked with and within a liturgical context. “The Centurion” places us as readers in the same way that the liturgy places us as believers: at the intersection where words encounter the Word—the same Word which darkness could not comprehend, but which we can understand even as the dumbfounded centurion understood Christ suddenly and forever.

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

“Breathing Together”—Modern Technology in Harmony with Traditional Music: An Interview with Matthew Curtis

Adam Bartlett (AB): What is your musical background and experience as a singer? Matthew Curtis (MC): I began training at age seven, singing in the La Crosse Boychoir in La Crosse, WI. I sang with them for seven years, and the experience provided me with the solid foundation of technique that has set me up for my entire singing career. I attended Viterbo University, also in La Crosse, majoring in Vocal Performance, Music Education, and Church Music followed by some graduate study at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. During this time I also auditioned for my dream job, singing with the world-renowned choral group Chanticleer. I joined Chanticleer in 2009, and I sang for three seasons with them, becoming their Assistant Music Director in my third season. It was the experience of a lifetime performing at the very pinnacle of the choral music art, touring all over the world and performing in the world’s finest concert halls and churches. I left Chanticleer in 2012 to pursue fully my work with Choral Tracks. Since Chanticleer, I have continued to sing with various professional groups regularly, both inside and outside of the liturgy. Liturgical singing, in a number of excellent sacred music programs across the country, has been a pillar of my career and has shown me the highest pinnacle of musical artistry for liturgical choirs. AB: What is the difference between a choral singer and a liturgical singer? MC: I think that the two are connected and related in many ways. To me, one of the core purposes of music as a fine art is beauty. A liturgical singer is devoted specifically to enhancing the beauty of the liturgy, and to foster a prayerful experience for both the singer and the congregation in the context of the worship of God. For a typical choral singer, choir is a passion—but it does not necessarily have a sacred purpose, at least not in the way that liturgical music does. It’s a social and artistically moving experience, creating this beauty and art with others. In general, music has a mystic divinity

AB/CHORAL TRACKS

atthew Curtis has the soundtrack for your spiritual life—and it sounds heavenly. Curtis is the founder and director of Choral Tracks, an online service for musicians which, as the organization’s website notes, “provides professionally sung rehearsal tracks for choral singers of all levels, promoting independent, accurate, and expressive singing.” Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Onalaska, WI, Choral Tracks is only the latest endeavor for Curtis, whose storied career began in La Crosse, WI, and carried him to the heights of professional choral singing with the world-renowned, three-time Emmy-winning Chanticleer choral group. But celebrity hasn’t daunted Curtis in what he sees as his main mission—providing sacred music for the masses—and for Mass. Adam Bartlett is president and editor of Illuminare Publications of Littleton, CO, which produces and publishes sacred music resources to assist parishes in celebrating the liturgy beautifully and authentically today. Bartlett sat down with Curtis to discuss the current state of choral music both inside and outside the liturgy, Curtis’s own work in developing Choral Tracks, and the ways in which parishes can provide traditional and enriching music for the liturgy (an easier task than some might think!).

Matthew Curtis sings Eric Whitacre’s Alleluia in each of its multiple voices.

to it. It is a universal language that exists beyond our own personal realm of experience. When we come together to make music, it is a deeply spiritual experience, full of emotion and that which draws us to the divine. The act of a choir breathing together and combining each other’s voices to create something bigger than ourselves as individual performers is an incredibly moving experience. A liturgical singer at church is using this art in a more specific, sacred way in the liturgy, but a typical choral singer is also having a similar “religious” experience and is sharing that with an audience. I have sung in many church choirs as well as secular choirs in my life. I have encountered many wonderful people who sing in Catholic church choirs who are not Catholic, including selfproclaimed atheists and those who very much disagree with aspects of the Catholic Church. But the love of the music and the act of sharing it together is infectious, often transcending these incongruences. In these cases, I still always encounter a respect for the liturgy and an appreciation for the liturgical origins of Western music history, largely due to the transcendent beauty of this music. AB: What kind of influence, in your estimation, has the Catholic choral tradition (namely Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, etc.) had on the choral music world of today in general? Do you sense that influence remains strong? MC: It is certainly true that the entire Western Music tradition is built on the liturgical music tradition of the Catholic Church. Today’s young choral music composers are absolutely continuing that tradition. Eric Whitacre, for example, has not composed typical sacred music with sacred texts, but was certainly influenced by all past composers of sacred music such as Claudio Monteverdi and Anton Bruckner and many others in his studies. Use of the Mass, including the Requiem Mass, as an artistic vehicle for masterworks is still very prominent today. Composers such as Ola Gjeilo, Dan Forrest, John Rutter, and Kim Andre Arnesen use these masterwork art forms in very innovative ways. John Rutter composes in a more traditional manner, directly setting the Mass Ordinary texts as well as the traditional texts for his Requiem. He has also composed a Gloria and Magnificat in these traditional ways. Dan Forrest, who is not Catholic but is a devout Christian, used a more traditional form and text for his Requiem for the Living several years ago. Recently he has been more innovative with his works Jubilate Deo and Lux: The Dawn From On High. In these masterworks he uses a similar macro form of a traditional Catholic music masterwork but then is looser in the texts chosen and music composed for each of the individual movements. Gregorian chant, which is the font of all

Western Music, still has an immense influence on new music being written by young composers. AB: How did Choral Tracks come about? What is its aim? How is it being received, and who constitutes your typical user base? MC: I started ChoralTracks.com officially in 2012, but began testing the concept as early as 2007. I record educational rehearsal tracks for choir and solo singers to help them learn their parts. The recordings are real singing and designed to be the highest quality and most valuable rehearsal tracks on the market. I got my start on the project by recording Gregorian chant, which helped me learn the process and software and caused me to set up a website. I recorded all of the Mass Propers and Ordinaries found in the Gregorian Missal, amounting to over 700 chants in total, as a summer job in between school years. Choral Tracks has since grown to a catalog of over 13,000 pieces of choral music along with the Gregorian chants I began with. My catalog is broad, containing both sacred and secular music which ranges from the great masterworks of the past such as Handel’s Messiah to the newest arrangements of pop music today and everywhere in between. I work with high school and middle school choirs, children’s choirs, church choirs, and community choirs all over the world. The majority of my customers are community choirs and high school or middle school choirs. These organizations generally have more money to invest in a product like mine than church choirs do. Church choirs are also a bit more complicated from a budgeting standpoint as a lot of budgeting comes from a parish’s larger liturgical budget, and a product like mine often is not as high on a parish’s long priority list. I look forward to getting to a point where I can invite more church choir singers to use my product. My strategy for this expansion includes a new website and mobile apps which I launched this past spring (2019). They are built on an audio streaming subscription model where an individual singer can sign up and access my entire catalog. I hope that this expansion will give my customer base broader access to Choral Tracks content where perhaps a full choir can’t afford to sign up but individual singers can pay and participate if they so desire. AB: What kind of developments have you seen in Catholic sacred music during the time you have been building Choral Tracks? MC: My own Catholic sacred music experiences are perhaps more limited than those fully immersed in Catholic music; however, I do have a bit of insight into this question. From my vantage point I

see a growing demand for older traditions in Catholic music and a movement towards an ethos of devotion that much more directly aligns with the liturgy. Simple English chants seem to be rising in popularity from composers like yourself and organizations like Illuminare Publications. Sacred polyphony is treasured like never before and especially prominent in the work of current composers like Ola Gjeilo, Frank La Rocca, and Kevin Allen. There seems to be a movement toward the Catholic music tradition of chant and polyphony in this way, in contrast with the music that has been prominent in recent decades which has been a broader mixture of Protestant and more modern pop music traditions. These musical genres can bring beauty and meaning to the Mass, but are perhaps more appropriate outside the liturgy whereas chant and polyphony directly correlate with the Mass itself. With the recent, continuing decline in Mass attendance in the United States and other places around the world, it seems that those who are staying in the pews are increasingly desiring simplicity and are drawn to the traditions that specifically make us Catholic. AB: How can your efforts help Catholic parish music programs today? MC: Choral Tracks empowers singers to practice choral music on their own. For each piece of music, I provide a few different track options. A Balanced Voices track contains all voices and instruments in balanced volume to provide a full choir, professional recording perspective. Part Predominant tracks for each voice part isolate a voice part in a much higher volume with the other parts still in the background volume for reference. Accompaniment Tracks play only the instruments at a high volume with no voices in the recording mix. These tracks help music directors encourage and enable singers to practice on their own and to assign that learning time at home. Too many choir rehearsals are spent pounding out notes instead of focusing on achieving musical artistry. Choirs often learn the notes and rhythms of a piece just well enough to get by and then go out and perform it at Mass. Choral Tracks simplifies this note learning experience, enabling more meaningful artistry to emerge, which is better for everyone. It allows for more work to be done on conveying the actual text and its significance in the Mass and also on communicating the nuance of the composer’s perceived intentions. Choral Tracks also gives choirs more time to achieve a better blend and choral intonation. In effect, it is a tool that can empower parish choirs and enhance the entire musical experience of a parish. To hear samples of Matthew Curtis’s ChoralTracks, go to Adoremus.org or visit choraltracks.com.

Q A

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

THE RITE QUESTIONS : Is it necessary for the faithful to receive the final blessing to fulfill the Sunday Mass obligation?

: The “Sunday obligation” is found in the Code of Canon Law, where it states, “On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are obliged to participate in the Mass. Moreover, they are to abstain from those works and affairs which hinder the worship of God, the joy proper to the Lord’s day, or the suitable relaxation of mind and body” (canon 1247). This obligation is part of the responsibility of every Christian “to lead a holy life and to promote the growth of the Church and its continual sanctification, according to their own station” (canon 210). The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that “the Sunday Eucharist is the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice. For this reason the faithful are obliged to participate in the Eucharist on days of obligation, unless excused for a serious reason (for example, illness, the care of infants) or dispensed by their own pastor. Those who deliberately fail in this obligation commit

a grave sin” (2181). Two things should be noted as regards the Sunday obligation. First, Catholics are required to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days, but are not required to receive Holy Communion each time they attend Mass. Second, the law makes no distinction about “how much” of the Mass we must attend. Because it makes no distinction, in my opinion, we must – unless excused – participate in the entirety of the Mass, from beginning to end, in order to fulfill the Sunday obligation, in addition to abstaining from those things which hinder the worship of God and suitable relaxation. Of course, there are times when circumstances beyond our control may make us arrive late to the Holy Mass, but these situations should not be common occurrences. It is difficult to imagine too many situations (excepting sudden emergencies) in which departing from the Holy Mass only a

minute or two before the conclusion

Continued from NEWS & VIEWS, page 2 Apostolic Life, whether of pontifical or diocesan right, wish to celebrate the conventual or community Mass in their own oratories according to the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal, they are permitted to do so. If an individual community or an entire Institute or Society wishes to have such celebrations frequently, habitually or permanently, the matter is to be decided by the Major Superiors according to the norm of law and their particular laws and statutes.” Dalla Torre asked that all members of the Knights be informed of the decision, in particular the head chaplains, so that it may be respected.

Father Augustus Tolton, Former African American Slave, Advances Toward Sainthood By Courtney Grogan

AB/CNA/COURTESY OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF CHICAGO

VATICAN CITY (CNA)—Father Augustus Tolton advanced along the path to sainthood June 12, making the runaway slave-turned-priest one step closer to being the first black American saint. Pope Francis recognized the heroic virtue of Father Tolton, making him “venerable” within Venerable Augustus the Church, only two Tolton (1854-1897) steps away from canonization. With the decree, Catholics are now authorized to pray directly to Tolton as an intercessor before God. Venerable John Augustus Tolton was born into slavery in Monroe County, Missouri, in 1854. He escaped slavery with his family during the Civil War by crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois. The young Tolton entered St. Peter’s Catholic School in Quincy, Illinois, with the help of the school’s pastor, Father Peter McGirr. The priest went on to baptize Tolton, instruct him for his first Holy Communion, and recognize his vocation to the priesthood. No American seminary would accept Tolton because of his race, so he studied for the priesthood in Rome. However, when Father Tolton returned to the U.S. after his ordination in 1889, thousands of people lined the streets to greet him. A brass band played hymns and Negro Spirituals, and black and white people processed together into the local church. Father Tolton was the first African American to be ordained a priest. He served for three years at a parish in Quincy, before moving to Chicago to start a parish for black Catholics, St. Monica Parish, where he remained until his death in 1897.

would be necessary. The Mass begins with the Introductory Rites, which “precede the Liturgy of the Word, namely, the Entrance, the Greeting, the Penitential Act, the Kyrie, the Gloria in excelsis (Glory to God in the highest), and Collect, [and] have the character of a beginning, an introduction, and a preparation” (GIRM, 46). The Holy Mass begins, then, with the entrance of the priest (and the ministers), accompanied, if there is one, by a chant or hymn. The Mass finishes with the Concluding Rites, which may include announcements and always includes the Priest’s Greeting and Blessing, the Dismissal, and, finally, “the kissing of the altar by the Priest and the Deacon, followed by a profound bow to the altar by the Priest, the Deacon, and the other ministers,” unless the tabernacle is

Holy See Confirms Order of Baptism of Children, Second Edition

From the May 2019 Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship Newsletter The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has confirmed the Order of Baptism of Children, Second Edition for the dioceses of the United States. The decree of confirmation is dated April 11, 2019 (Prot. n. 163/18), and was received by the USCCB [United States Conference of Catholic Bishops] on May 7. Originally prepared by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the updated translation was done in accord with the principles of Liturgiam Authenticam but does not change the Baptismal ritual itself. All the textual amendments made by the USCCB to the ICEL text were confirmed by the Congregation, as were all five adaptations proposed by the USCCB: 1) the text of an optional introductory monition, 2) the addition of a sample acclamation after each Baptism, 3) harmonized rubrics incorporating previously approved U.S. ritual variations, 4) the option to use an expanded Litany of the Saints, and 5) a new appendix for the Baptism of children within Mass. Once the Secretariat of Divine Worship completes its standard review process, Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, USCCB President, will promulgate a decree of publication establishing the implementation date(s).

Society for Catholic Liturgy 2019 Conference: September 26-28 Say to someone, “The family that prays together…,” and likely that person will be able to finish the adage without blinking an eye: “…stays together!” First made famous by the Rosary Priest, Father Patrick Peyton (1909-1992), this familiar old saw may have become somewhat cliché, but the sentiment behind it is anything but—at least as far as the Society for Catholic Liturgy is concerned. “The Sacred Liturgy and the Family” is this year’s theme for the Society’s annual conference, to be held Sept. 26-28 in Providence, RI, at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul and Providence College. The three-day conference features Dr. Timothy O’Malley, director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, and Dr. Robert Fastiggi, professor of Systematic Theology, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, MI. O’Malley and Fastiggi will provide respective keynote addresses at the opening and closing of the conference. The Society for Catholic Liturgy was founded in 1995 as “a multidisciplinary association of Catholics scholars, teachers, pastors and professionals—including architects and musicians—in the Anglophone world,” according to the Society’s website, and “is committed to promoting scholarly study and practical renewal of the Church’s liturgy.” For more information about the conference or to register, visit: www.liturgysociety.org. Deadline for registration is September 16.

located in the sanctuary, toward which all genuflect instead (GIRM, 90d). Given what the Lord Jesus has done for us, the fulfillment of the Sunday obligation ought to be done out of a sense of devotion and love. Indeed, because “the Christian faithful are to hold the Most Holy Eucharist in highest honor, taking an active part in the celebration of the most august sacrifice, receiving this sacrament most devoutly and frequently, and worshipping it with highest adoration,” the question of “how much” of the Mass one must attend ought not enter into the thoughts of a Catholic. Our love of the Lord Jesus and for the community of the faithful should be such that we have a longing to worship together at the altar of the Lord. — Answered by Fr. Daren Zehnle, Diocese of Springfield (IL)

Continued from SARAH, page 5 this division exists, do those who wage the battle really know what they are experiencing in the liturgy? Divine worship is an encounter with supernatural realities, through which a human being should be transformed and not reduced to vain, sterile endeavors. Does the God whom I encounter in the liturgy permit me to “cling” to one rite to the exclusion of the others? The liturgy can be nothing other than a relation with the divine. The lack of understanding between different ways of thinking about the liturgy can be explained by legitimate cultural factors, but nothing can justify its transformation into anathemas hurled by either side. Benedict XVI ardently wished to reconcile the different liturgical schools. He put a lot of energy and hope into that endeavor, and yet it has not arrived at its noble goal. Indeed, beyond the rite, God looks first for human hearts. In the liturgy, Jesus gives us his Body and Blood to configure us to himself and to make us one with him. We become Christ, and his Blood makes us his kin, men and women immersed in his love, with the Holy Trinity dwelling in us. We become one family: God’s family. If a person respects the ancient rites of the Church but is not in love, that individual is perishing. I think that this is the situation of the most extremist adherents of the various liturgical schools. Strict, almost fundamentalist ritualism or the modernist-type deconstruction of the rite can cut people off from a true search for the love of God. There is no disputing the fact that this love is born and grows in respect for [liturgical] forms; but the tensions lead sooner or later to nothingness. As I speak to you, I hear the voice of Saint Ambrose, who, in his commentary on Cain and Abel, warns us, saying: “The Lord Jesus asked you to pray attentively and frequently, not so as to prolong your prayer in boredom, but rather to renew it in regularity. When prayer goes on too long, it very often drifts into emptiness, but when it becomes rare, negligence invades our heart.” In Africa, when I attend Masses that last six hours, I see only a celebration that suits personal preferences. I strongly doubt that there is a true encounter with God in such moments of continual excitement and dances that are not very conducive to the encounter with the mystery. God is horrified by forms of ritualism in which man satisfies himself. Even though it is necessary to give thanks to God for the real vitality of our African liturgies and the full participation of the Christian people, when the mystery of the death and Resurrection is encumbered by additional elements that are foreign to the Eucharist, it gives the impression that we are celebrating ourselves. We absolutely must strive to do again what Jesus did. Let us remember his Word: “Do this in memory of me.” The Catholic Church should reflect and take action in response to scandalous liturgical phenomena. Other people of faith, especially Muslims, are shocked to see the debasement of some celebrations. This can be the case with processions, which lead us to the celebration of the great mystery of our faith but are made without any recollection, without any sense of wonder, without any religious “awe” at being face to face with God. The celebrants chat and discuss all sorts of trifling things while walking up the altar of the Lord! This type of behavior cannot be observed in a mosque, because Muslims have more respect for the sacred than many Christians do.

Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

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Adoremus Bulletin, July 2019

Holiness and the Sacramental Life: A Guidebook for Our Return to God present the invisible realities they signify. This is especially true in the holy Eucharist, where ordinary bread and wine become the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. Father Tangorra, citing St. Cyril, writes that the Eucharist is the pinnacle of mystagogical instruction. Christ is spiritually present in the Word of God in scripture and in the faithful of the Church, but Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist. Our consuming of his body is not cannibalism, as some understood Jesus’ words at the time, but a partaking in his resurrected body in a sacramental way. It is through the mediation of the priesthood of Christ, Father Tangorra writes, that “divine things are made available to humanity.” He further explains, “The whole purpose of the sacred liturgy is to offer humanity, through the priesthood of Jesus Christ, entrance into the inner communion of love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

By Brian Kranick Holiness and Living the Sacramental Life by Father Philip-Michael Tangorra. Emmaus Road Publishing, 2017. 242 pp. ISBN: 978-1947792258. $29.95 Hardcover; $19.95 Paperback and eBook. The Church is in crisis. Mass attendance has dropped to historically low numbers, and even of those still attending Mass, gray-haired people far outnumber young people. The Church is facing a demographic implosion. Many Catholics lack even the basic catechetical knowledge of their faith. The catechumens entering the Church are instructed in the mystagogy of the faith, but the greater Body of Christ is also in need of a renewed catechesis. Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, diagnosed the solution accurately. “What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every age is holiness, not management,” he states in The Ratzinger Report. Father Philip-Michael Tangorra seeks to address this need in the Church with his well-written and timely book Holiness and the Sacramental Life. Part of the problem in the Church today is that “the sense of mystery and understanding of the faith has been lost,” Father Tangorra writes. What is truly of “vital importance in the Church today” is a return to the mystery and beauty of the Catholic Church, in order “to wake up the sleeping Catholic.” If Catholics do not see mystery and beauty in the Church, he argues, they will not be drawn to it, or drawn back into it. Seeing Is Believing The Church must reflect this mystery and beauty. This happens first, naturally, on a sensory level, as we witness beauty in a church’s sacred art, sacred architecture, and sacred music. These should draw us to the source of all beauty, who is God. The beauty in the arts should lead us to the beauty of God. The Church should reflect the surpassing grandeur of our heavenly Father. Beauty is also reflected in the sacred mysteries of the Church, the seven sacraments, and especially in the sacred liturgy of the sacrifice of the Mass. It is in these seven mysteries of the Church that we make our spiritual pilgrimage of this life. Father Tangorra frames his whole work around this spiritual pilgrimage, with the exitus, God’s self-revelation and communication to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the reditus, humanity’s return to unity with God. This is the journey every individual must make, with varying levels of success and failure. God’s exitus towards us reached its climax with the Incarnation—the revelation of the Son of God. Our reditus is our response to the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Our reditus is also our return to God through the sacraments of Christ mediated by his Church. It is through the mediation of the Catholic Church, the “universal sacrament of salvation,” that the faithful are especially blessed to receive the sanctifying grace of Christ. In the mysteries of the sacraments, we encounter Christ and are “purified, illumined, and perfected” by him, and through them. This is the theme throughout Father Tangorra’s book: the threefold process of purification, illumination, and perfection of the faithful through the sacramental encounter with Christ. In this spiritual pilgrimage of exitus and reditus, we assume our respective spots in the ecclesiastical choir before God. Through the open side of Christ on the Cross, the comingling of blood and water flowed out. We must receive the sacramental water of Baptism and the sacramental blood of the Eucharist in order “to enter the kingdom, the Body of Christ.” Yet, when we deny the efficaciousness of the sacraments, the Church loses its sense of mystery. If the sacraments are merely signs and symbols, and not truly efficacious in giving sanctifying grace, why would one continue with them? Sacramental Being In his book, Father Tangorra notes that the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, in particular, make one ontologically different. A real difference exists between the baptized and the non-baptized, as the baptized has been incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ. In Baptism, Christ makes “all things new” (Revelation 21:5). We are anointed to share in Christ’s threefold offices as priest, prophet, and king. The sacramental character imparted in Baptism is brought to maturity and fullness in the Sacrament of Confirmation. In Baptism and Confirmation together, we become adopted sons of God, partakers in the divine nature, “living stones,” a spiritual house, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1268). How many Catholics consider this in our daily lives? The baptized and confirmed constitute the common priesthood of the faithful. As Father Tangorra points out, this means that all of the laity have “a mediatory capacity.”

The laity can and should offer intercessory prayers and sacrifices, by virtue of our sharing in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In Baptism, one dies with Christ into the water and rises with Christ out of the water. The Christian must live out the vocation of picking up his or her Cross and following after Christ on his via dolorosa. We must die to ourselves and share in the suffering of the Cross. Yet, this suffering is not void of meaning. It is suffering that dies and falls in the ground, but also grows again to new life. As Catholics, our suffering, united with Christ, can be efficacious, intercessory, and mediatory for ourselves and for others, as part of the Communion of the Saints. We are priests offering sacrifices in our lives, for the salvation of souls and to the glory of God. As Father Tangorra states, “even the way we drive our cars should bear witness to the resurrected glory of Jesus.” In other words, offer up that road rage—and any other challenges in life—as a sacrifice and allow it to be crucified with Christ. As part of the common priesthood of the faithful, we offer not only sacrifices, but also prayer. The Church is called to sanctify the whole day by praying without ceasing. Such prayer is an integral aspect to living a holy and sacramental life. Father Tangorra mentions various forms of devotions and sacramentals to aid in our sanctification of the day, including praying the Divine Office or the Liturgy of the Hours. In praying the Liturgy of the Hours, we seek to sanctify the day by praying seven times from morning to nighttime. “Praying without ceasing,” as St. Paul says (I Thessalonians 5:17), could also include the rosary, chaplets, novenas, and the Stations of the Cross, among other devotionals. In response to Our Lady of Fatima’s urgent request to pray the rosary every day, our daily routine should include at least five decades of the rosary. This is truly a minimum effort we should be making as part our vocations as Christians. In Baptism, we receive the white garments of Christ’s sanctifying grace. Yet, we know as sinful, fallen people, these white garments are dirtied regularly—and often. Christ has left us the means to wash our sullied garments clean, to make them white again in sanctity and righteousness, as Isaiah says, “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (1:18). This is the blessed assurance we have in the Sacrament of Penance, or Confession. The priest, acting in persona Christi, is able to forgive us of our sins and offer absolution through his ecclesiastical mediation of the fruits of the paschal mystery. Christ’s sanctifying grace is transmitted to the Church most commonly through the sacraments. Confession enables us to maintain our friendship with God, and continue on our spiritual reditus journey back to him. The final approach of our reditus journey comes to us at the hour of death. Christ provides forgiveness of sins and healing at this late stage with the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, or Extreme Unction. We can partake of this at any point in our lives, but it is especially important in that fateful moment before passing over to our final judgments and eternity. This moment of death is our last chance to wash the garments of our souls, to be as white and clean as possible. As with water, bread, and wine, the use of olive oil is an ordinary substance used in sacramental anointing to transmit holy and extraordinary graces. The ordinary signs and symbols of the sacraments make

Bride and Bridegroom But in order to have this greatest of sacraments, the vocational sacrament of Holy Orders is necessary. Through this sacrament, the priest perpetuates and promulgates the sacramental mediation of Christ to humanity. For without Holy Orders and the ministerial priesthood, there are no sacraments at all. The ministerial priesthood is able to consecrate the Eucharist and, in effect, nourish the Church. The ministerial priesthood enables the other vocational sacrament too, that of, Marriage. The Sacrament of Marriage serves as an authentic image for the love of Christ the Bridegroom for his Bride, the Church. The spousal love of husband and wife is an efficacious sign and symbol of the spousal love of Christ and the Church. As part of a symbiotic relationship, the priest through Holy Orders witnesses to marriage, and fruitful marriages are meant to nourish religious vocations—and, most importantly, a call to the priesthood.

Destination: Salvation Father Tangorra concludes his book by noting that the spiritual pilgrimage of each Catholic reaches its apex in the Mass: “The exitus-reditus movement of purification, illumination, and perfection is stamped throughout the sacred liturgy, but the Mass, above all, is that sublime act of worship that, through a union with the Paschal mystery, elevates humanity and draws it back into perfect harmony with the divine.” One cannot attain saintly holiness apart from the sacraments. The liturgy of the Mass, Father Tangorra states, “imitates the journey of Christ’s life on earth.” The Mass reaches the sacrifice of Golgotha in the consecration of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood; but it also proclaims the reality of the Resurrection event in Communion. The one Church partakes in the one Eucharist, mediated by the one High Priest Jesus Christ. In the liturgy, all of humanity is offered up to God the Father, so “that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11). Father Tangorra mentions that there are numerous sacred liturgical rites throughout the Church, but his book focuses considerable discussion on the Roman Liturgy, in both its ordinary and extraordinary forms. In a Church where there is, at times, some misplaced tension between those who practice the ordinary form and those who practice the extraordinary form of the Mass, it is good to hear Father Tangorra write that “neither of the two forms of the Roman liturgy are in any way deficient for our spiritual and intellectual formation as Christians.” Both the ordinary and the extraordinary forms of the Roman liturgy, he reminds us, are valid. Father Tangorra’s book is in many ways a tour of the Catechism. It points us towards the way to look for beauty and mystery in the Church and the sacraments. Rediscovering the beauty and mystery in the sacramental life of the Church is ultimately how the Church can be revitalized. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by Me” (John 14:6). If Father Tangorra’s book does nothing else, it reminds us, at a time when we need such reminding, that the Catholic Church is the mediator of Christ’s sanctifying grace on earth, and as such, it is through the sacraments that we find the way, the truth, and the life. The sacramental life is our spiritual pilgrimage to bring us back into communion with God. Holiness and the Sacrament Life is itself a well-guided and timely journey through this ultimate pilgrimage. Brian Kranick is a freelance writer focusing on all things Catholic. In addition to other studies, he has a master’s degree in Systematic Theology from Christendom College. He has spent years working as an analyst in the United States government’s intelligence community, and currently resides with his wife and three children in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of the blog: sacramentallife.com.