RBWords - Volume 26 - Number 1: January 2013
Something to Think About
Twenty-six years have passed since I first began to write this monthly newsletter. The passage of time has a way of sneaking past one. I will turn 70 next month and I began writing RBWORDS just short of my 45th! (My math is a little shaky on figuring this out!) Anyhow, the effort remains a joy for me since many of my readers are not folks who send a lot of e-mails or even the old-fashioned written letter, yet remain beloved through their friendship and prayers! At least you'll have some idea of what I'm doing!
The church is celebrating a “Year of Faith” and the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. How well do I remember that! I entered the Dominican order in the third year of the council, 1964, and experienced English in the Mass for the first time at the novitiate because the bishop of Winona, MN, where the novitiate was located, jumped the gun and started the vernacular liturgy before Advent. Later on, the celebrant started facing the congregation and the “changes” were underway! They continue, although some of them at times seem like “changes back” than “changes forward.” The church has seemed to me like a kaleidoscope. The ingredients at the end of the cardboard tube stay the same but they are turned and looked at differently as the tube is turned. The same has been true of my religious community. Things my novice director said one day would never change, the next day they did! The essentials, however, have remained and I am grateful for all the study that I have tried to continue even after studium (seminary) that helps me find the essentials in the midst of the new ways of presenting them.
I have also been very blessed to have had many wonderful years in campus ministry, and now some very wonderful experiences in full time itinerant preaching! Brief stints as pastor of an Hispanic parish, as novice master, and as vicar-provincial have filled out the picture of experience. Even as I plan to “cut back” some over the next year or so, I intend to keep at the preaching in RBWORDS (monthly) and in THE WORD TO THE WISE (daily) both of which can be found at the website <www.rbwords.com> which my dear friends, Craig and Christina Baker, created for me back in 2005. As long as I can get to the keyboard, you'll “hear” from me!
It Has Been Said
“The Church ought not be didactic and patronizing, as if it possessed the whole truth and it expected the world to do what it said. This is the sort of attitude that has created barriers between the Church and the world. It is no good to lament the unhappy state of the world and to give the Church sole credit for everything that is good in it. A moralizing and preaching tone should be avoided. Just as students are better led to the truth by discovering it for themselves, by example not by imposition, the Church should not demand that the world conform to its teachings but present the truth in a way that people can grasp it, rather than having it forced on them. The Church has much to learn from the world, just as the world should learn from it, of people's free will through rational inquiry.”
from a speech given at the Second Vatican Council by the Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, Karol Wojtyla, who later on became (Bl.) Pope John Paul II.
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