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Month: January 2007

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Music Scholarship Sunday

God ascends amid shouts of joy,
Yahweh at the sound of the horn.

Praise God, praise him with psalms!
Praise our king, praise him with psalms!

For God is the ruler of all the earth;
praise him to the utmost of your ability.

— Psalm 47:5-7

The PNCC observes Music Scholarship Sunday on the last Sunday in January.

Polish National Catholics are encouraged to support the scholarship program and are asked to encourage youth in their pursuit of music education, to pray for our organists, choir directors, and choir members, and to take part in the ministry of song – raising their voices unto the Lord. We are also asked to pray for all those who have gone before us and who have worked for the glory of God through music ministry.

Persons wishing to apply to the National United Choirs scholarship program may obtain an application from their pastor or choir director or by writing to:

Music Scholarship Committee
National United Choirs
280 Valley View Dr
Westfield, MA 01085.

Applications are available between January 1st and March 20th. Applications must be received no later than April 1st.

There is also a Junior Incentive Award. Applications may only be obtained through your pastor, assistant pastor, administrator, deacon, choir member, director or organist, or Parish Committee member.

Homilies,

The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Your words, Lord, are Spirit and life.

I am going to speak today from the first person singular, for I have something I need to say to all of you.

I was asked to prepare several reports for the recent annual meeting. In preparing those reports I sinned.

Those reports were prepared with a stunning lack of charity. They were polemics, they were diatribes, they were uncharitable, they were inappropriate, and they were unfitting for a man who is ordained to the ministry of service.

These reports were not reports. They aren’t an abstract concept. I cannot say that I prepared a report and the report is wrong. No, I prepared the reports and I was wrong.

I have given grave offense to many, and I am deeply and truly sorry.

This issue, this sin of mine has borne down upon me. In reflecting on this sin I recalled the words from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

In translating scripture the word love, as used by Paul in this passage, is interchangeable with charity, so:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not charity, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And Paul goes on to remind us:

So faith, hope, charity abide, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

In recalling those words I found that I was not filled with faith, hope, or charity —“ but only with myself.

I want to thank those who have confronted me about this. One family in particular gave the greatest example of living by biblical principals. They followed Jesus’ method in correcting me. In Matthew 18 Jesus says:

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.—

I have listened to my brother and sister. I have heard their words. I have taken them to heart.

In their words they pointed out that having my name on the reports was a non-issue. They would have known who had written them simply by the tone and tenor of what was said. It was 100% me.

I’ve created quite a public and private persona. I am harsh, demanding, judgmental, and most of all uncharitable.

The words of Psalm 51 apply:

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

My problem is exactly this. The exterior harshness of my personality is a shadow of the interior harshness with which I treat myself. When I sin, when I continually fall into the same sins, I am tempted to give up hope, to resign myself to my own evil, to loose faith completely and in doing so to reject God.

I was recently told that the cure for this type of giving up, this personality disorder, is to tie oneself ever closer to the crucified one. My sin is great, His love is greater.

Ezra echoes that in today’s first reading:

Do not be saddened this day,
for rejoicing in the LORD must be your strength!—

The Lord must be my hope and strength.

David goes on in Psalm 51, which we sing at the beginning of most Holy Masses

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Fill me with joy and gladness; let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

I ask the Lord for a new and right spirit. I trust and hope in Him. I beg you for your forgiveness and your continuing fraternal correction.

It will not be easy for me to turn harshness to charity, but with God’s grace, the love of the Church, and your love everything is possible.

Your words, Lord, are Spirit and life.

Christian Witness, Current Events, Perspective, Political,

Of deacons, polls, and charity

The Buffalo News has featured two reports over the past two days regarding a R.C. deacon who publicly reproved Congressman Brian Higgins from the ambo (pulpit) last Sunday.

From today’s report: Deacon hailed for pulpit blast at Higgins

The Buffalo Regional Right to Life Committee on Wednesday hailed a deacon who criticized Rep. Brian Higgins during Sunday Mass in St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church.

Deacon Tom McDonnell’s rebuke of the Buffalo Democrat for voting for federal funding for embryonic stem cell research led Higgins to walk out of the church during his sermon.

“God bless the deacon a thousand times. He did his job. If every bishop, every clergy member of all faiths did their jobs, we wouldn’t have the shedding of innocent life in our country,” said Stacey Vogel of the Buffalo Regional Right to Life Committee.

The anti-abortion group’s position was in stark contrast with the phone calls and e-mails at Higgins’ Buffalo and Washington offices, which were running in his favor by a nearly 4 to 1 ratio, according to a staff member.

According to the latest polls people deem the earth to be flat – therefore it must be.

Higgins said his relationship with St. Thomas Aquinas Church, where he was baptized and married, is “very deep, very meaningful and very long.” He apologized earlier for the congregation’s having to be subjected to criticism of him during the morning Mass.

“The lesson here is that the Catholic Church has enough problems and should take greater care before allowing nonpriests to use the church as a forum to advance what clearly was a political agenda,” Higgins said…

Based on his long and loving relationship with the Church he has stepped to the fore in opposing attacks on human life… oops, maybe not.

Also, I see that he has taken a strong interest in his faith and that he has been properly catechized. See, there’s priests and non-priests, that’s about all there is to my faith. Also, life is a subjective good and no one can tell me what to do, unless of course they let Senator Clinton or some other womyn preach – and I’ll make an exception for Michael J. Fox.

All this being said, I do believe the deacon was wrong for the following reasons:

  • The deacon is not the pastor. Mr. Higgins’ pastor is the Rev. Art Smith, and as pastor this responsibility falls to him. The problem with some deacons (me especially) is that we want to step-up and fill-in wherever and whenever we see something lacking. We are not the answer. We need to be more humble, more in tune with our ministry, and this is a good reminder of that fact.
  • The homily serves two purposes, cracking open the scriptures in such a way so as to edify and teach all the people you minister to, and as a call to apply that scripture to our everyday lives. It is not an occasion for political showmanship or the airing of one’s personal grievances, regardless of how in-tune those grievances are with Church teaching.
  • Charity, scripture, and Catholic polity demand that one reprove one’s brother in private first, then in front of witnesses, and finally, if he is obstinate, before the community. If that communal reproof is to have any meaning it must come from the Church’s representative in the community – the Bishop.

In conclusion, the lack of leadership on the part of some Bishops and pastors and their acquiescence to political power provide fertile soil for these types of events. They also make taking sides in issues like this the go-to thing to do.

From the original story: Pulpit barb prompts walkout by Higgins

A deacon upbraided Rep. Brian Higgins during Sunday morning Mass in St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church for voting in favor of embryonic stem cell research, prompting the congressman and his family to walk out during the sermon.

The Rev. Art Smith, pastor of the South Buffalo church, said he felt “horrible” about the Higgins family’s departure on “Respect Life Sunday” and offered an apology from the pulpit after the congressman had left.

Bishop Edward U. Kmiec of the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo later issued a statement also criticizing Deacon Tom McDonnell’s action.

“I can’t tell you how terrible I felt,” Smith said Tuesday. “While we have to always uphold the church’s teachings regarding life, I don’t think it’s ever fair to publicly criticize someone who serves our community and our parish so well.”

The right-to-life community, with the deacon will be on one side, the congressman – obviously obdurate in error will be on the other, and the leaders of the Church will appear to be weak on the sanctity of life.

Please, pray for the protection of all human life and for us deacons.

Everything Else

WordPress 2.1 upgrade and issues

In short order the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 was a tad more complicated than expected.

I followed the instructions for upgrading exactly. My upgrades tend to fail on the last step – running the upgrade.php. The called for database updates fail completely.

The blog was back and operational, but there were errors. I printed out the errors generated from upgrade.php and did the updates to the database manually using phpMyAdmin. It was a little slow going, but I have enough of a background so that the SQL statements were not insurmountable. Of course I had to dabble while I was in there, and I took the opportunity to delete tables leftover from old plugins.

Everything else appeared to work fine, but my blogroll (links) were a mess. Most did not get labeled (categorized) so I had to do that manually. Once that was done the blogroll was duplicated, with all the links in their respective categories AND in the whichever category was listed first, effectively doubling the links. I tried all sorts of strategies, read the codex, and a bunch of posted help topics. All I could find was info on the php coding changes necessary to display links. Since I use widgets I looked through the links code in the widgets plugin. The code looked fine (hey, what do I know anyway…). I tried toggling various other plugins to no avail.

I got the idea that it was the way the theme (I’ve been using WP-Andreas01 1.3) was handling the links. I really didn’t want to change themes, mostly because of the work I have to do to reset widget order and the back-end coding I’ll have to do to fix my database pages, but I figured I’d invested about 4 hours already so I went ahead.

I had a nice Web 2.0 style theme, Subtle by Glued Ideas. I selected it and everything looked peachy.

In retrospect it was a great experience. I think the blog looks far better under the new theme, less choppy.

Christian Witness, Perspective, Political

Raise your voices, cry onto the Lord

Roe v. Wade – the march of death goes on. So raise your voices today and every day.

Lord have mercy on us and on our nation for we have sinned grievously.

It’s not just abortion, but our wanton rush toward death as an answer for every problem. War, put ’em out of their misery (especially those without a voice such as handicapped children and the mentally retarded), euthanasia, the death penalty, war again. It is the Pandora’s box of death.

Beseeching the Lord to save oneself or those one loves was not enough. Now we must pray, O man, kill me and my kin. Lead me into the grave and shut the door – there is no more.

So we pray, march, and witness. O Lord, save us and have mercy.

There’s some great stuff out in the blogsphere on this. Fr. Jim Tucker covers it well in Abortion and Freedom.

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