Abbey-Roads2

At St. Joan of Arc, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

(Pictured - the joy of being forgiven.)

“As the room turned dark and our eyes adjusted, the light of the more than three hundred lit candles began to appear in a breathtaking beautiful glow. Each of those lit candles meant that the individual holding it had listened to words from the likes of Julian of Norwich and Hildegard Von Bingen plus prayers offered by Julie Madden and other Prayer Partners.

All were awaiting a final blessing and absolution from our new pastor, Fr. Jim DeBruycker.

Patrick Stevens led the Prayer Partners in this Ritual of Light and Candles to celebrate the Communal Reconciliation Service at St. Joan of Arc parish held at 4 o’clock pm, Sunday, December 11, 2005 in the gym at St. Joan of Arc.

This service in various forms began some years ago when The Sacrament of Penance could be given in communal form and was referred to as the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Sunday evening’s service left no doubt in anyone’s mind that this communal service had far more depth of understanding than the past method which often turned people away because of much undue guilt and fear.

In this service the prayers and stories told us about Purgatory, which Fr. DeBruycker explained was what happens to us when we finally meet Jesus after our death. We look into ourselves and at how we lived our lives. At that time, we will earnestly wish that we had done more to follow the road Jesus laid out for us. We will wish we had done more for others as Christ told us to do.” [snip] Read on, link.

I’m verklempt!

(St. Joan’s is so all over the blogs today! See my post from 8/28/06 “Nothin’ to blog about.”)

To play your part in a movie about your life?

That Karr guy freak (The Jon Bennet Ramsey suspect, now proven a psycho.) wants Johnny Dep to play his part.

So I thought - who would I want?

Who else? Jon Lovitz! Oh! The drama!

If you know me, take a shot. Who could play my part? Or, just post who you would want to play your part. (No one reads this blog, so there will not be many entries - to my own embarrassment.)

What if this is as good as it gets?

What if Christian churches do not ever unite? What if Anglicans and Lutherans and Orthodox just keep splintering and subdividing? While Catholics keep splitting apart; there are “Old Catholics” and traditionalists, with ultra-traditionalists and sedevacantists, and of course those loyal to the Pope and Vatican II, (Wow - let me rush in to clarify that many traditionalists as well as novus ordo faithful are very loyal to the Pope and the Council!) followed by liberals and progressives. Then we may divide Catholics according to diocese and region, continued down to individual parishes such as St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis contrasted with St. Agnes in St. Paul - with the others in-between. We already have the so-called “American Catholic Church” (as a few on the NCCB staff might term it) and the Roman Catholic Church. There seems to me to be many fractures in the edifice.

Maybe the Church will just have to be smaller - maybe numbers will not matter. (Benedict XVI sort of intimated this idea once in an interview.) Maybe those coming into the Church will remain individual conversions, and there just may not be a general reunion of Churches. The Catholic Church already exists whole and entire unto herself; we are already “One, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Is not the Church complete in herself as the Mystical Body of Christ?

My last post dealt with the current Archbishop of Canterbury saying homosexuals are welcome into the Anglican Church, yet they must change and be converted. This teaching compares well with the Roman Catholic Church. I have always said, we ourselves must change, not the revealed truth of God as taught by the Catholic Church. Therefore it follows, the ‘other’ churches and denominations must seek to be united to Peter, to the Roman Catholic Church in the same sense the Anglican Archbishop requires of the homosexual person to come into union with the Anglican church. For true union to occur, the other denominations must accept the teachings and tradition of the Roman Pontiff and the Magisterium.

As Pope Pius XI stated in his encyclical, Mortalium Animos;

“Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See…not with the intention and the hope that the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government.” (This would apply to dissident Catholic churches as well, such as St. Joan of Arc.)

Not much to ask, is it? But what if this is as good as it gets?