It's not too late it is never too late to make things right. The willful destruction of many statues and shrines in churches in the 1970s (under the guise of “implementing Vatican II”) is now generally acknowledged to have been a disaster, along with the deliberate and unnecessary abandonment of virtually all Latin in some parishes, so that words and phrases such as “ Gloria in excelsis“, “ Pater noster” and “ Sanctus” now mean little or nothing to many people.īut perhaps the greatest loss was the sense of “folk Catholicism”, a confidence in our own value as a faith community, a people on pilgrimage together with ideas, songs, traditions and customs that bind us with one another and with those who have gone before. We are creating generations of cultural and spiritual orphans expecting them to remain Catholics without any links with the past, and without the sense of belonging to a community that has a glorious heritage of which they are a part and to which they can make their own contribution. Their ideas about Christmas and Easter are formed not by Christians traditions but by commercial ones, and increasingly a paganized Halloween is replacing even the vaguest notions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day and praying for the dead in November.
They don't have a liturgical “map” in their heads with landmarks such as Advent, Lent, or Pentecost. What are we doing? Many young Catholics don't even know we are meant to fast on Ash Wednesday, or attend Mass on various Holy Days. Few would be able to explain confidently, for example, why we genuflect before the Tabernacle or why the priest wears vestments of different colors at various times of the year. Many Catholic boys and girls today are more familiar with football rituals than with some of the basic signs and symbols of our Faith. In discussion afterwards, it became clear that there was widespread concern at the loss of our sense of Catholic culture of belonging to a community rich in a heritage of faith stretching back 2,000 years. These incidents came to mind as I spoke to a group of Catholic writers about Catholic customs the origins of things like pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday, the scattering of flowers before the Blessed Sacrament in procession, May crowning of a statue of Mary, the blessing of throats for Saint Blaise in February.
0 kommentar(er)
