Regarding yesterday’s "Tongue in Cheek?", a poster on the CathNews discussion board has pointed out that Ron Calli is a play on the name Angelo Roncalli, a.k.a. Pope John XXIII. Still, I wonder if the pseudonymous author was taking himself seriously or borrowing from the comic stylings of Jonathan Swift (ala "A Modest Proposal").
The fight over Communion has taken on local significance for me.
Protesters urge bishop to deny communion to pro-abortion legislators
Thursday, June 17, 2004
By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A dozen people picketed the Downtown headquarters of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh yesterday, calling on Bishop Donald Wuerl to deny communion to Catholic legislators who support legal abortion."
I sincerely hope this article is a joke. Read for yourself and drop me a comment with your take.
All in God’s Good Time
by Ron Calli
"When Pope John Paul dies, the conclave could do no better, both for the Church and the world, than to elect an Anglo-Saxon (or Celt) pope. Someone from the UK or Ireland or Australia or Canada or New Zealand. Not America. International politics would be too complicated with a Yankee pope."
I’d like to welcome Father Michael Darcy to the blogosphere. He’s a member of the
Oratorian Community of Saint Philip Neri and is a campus minister at the Ryan Catholic
Newman Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He’s an orthodox priest and a cool
guy. Check out his blog.
Here’s a completely different take on the current communion debate that’s all the
rage these days.
Staying
in the Pew at Communion Time
I’ve come to believe that part of the problem has to do with the unremitting insistence
on frequent Communion. I will pause for a moment as 90% of my readers emit gasps
of horror at what I’ve just written. I think we’ve hammered frequent Communion (a
wonderful thing, in itself) into the people’s heads so hard and have at the same
time failed so miserably to catechize them on the full richness of this Sacrament’s
meaning, that now we find Communion time resembling (as one of my scandalized Mexican
parishioners described the English-language Masses) a stampede of cattle, leaving
behind empty pew after empty pew as everyone surges forward to get a Host. And if
they can’t have a Host, you damn sure better give them a nice blessing because it’s
Communion time and, you know, everybody has to get something. I’ve had people go
to confession for not having gone to Communion even though they were present for
an entire Mass. It is not a sin not to go to Communion. But people have been led
to believe that it is. Together with the misunderstood insistence on frequent Communion,
a poor understanding of “active participation in the Liturgy” must shoulder
a fair share of the blame.