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Vol. 12 No. 26
Thursday, July 18,1974
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Liturgy Just Beginning
OFFICIAL SA YS:
WASHINGTON (NC) -- The “need for the liturgical movement or revitalization on the parish level has just
started,” according to Father Virgil Funk, newly appointed executive director of the Liturgical Conference.
In an interview the diocesan priest from Richmond, Va., said he took the job with the Liturgical Conference
because he sees a real challenge in trying to help develop “a rich, sustaining liturgy” in parishes across the country.
He questioned the idea that the folk
Mass is the primary model for a good
liturgy today. He stressed that a team of
good “pastoral practitioners” is
necessary for liturgical development in a
parish. And he argued that a grassroots
development in ritual and symbolism is
essential to recapturing the richness of
the liturgy.
The Liturgical Conference, he said,
exists to serve “as a focus or forum of
exchange among pastoral practitioners”
who are trying to resolve current
problems and help the American Church
grow and develop in its liturgy.
Father Funk uses the term “pastoral
practitioner” often as a sort of
short-hand for priests and laymen who
are engaged in planning, developing and
executing liturgical celebrations at the
parish level.
In the interview Father Funk stressed
that “beauty, art, quality are essential
to a good liturgical celebration.
“There’s a tension in this area. A
tension exists between the desire to
have the liturgy come out of the people
and the need for the community to be
challenged to be more than what it is.”
He said that pastoral practitioners
have often “consciously or
unconsciously” employed a single
model for what makes a good liturgy,
the folk Mass.
“I think there’s a number of pastoral
people in the United States who after
they’re done doing their best, have this
twinge that it’s not working,” he said.
“You just can’t sing ‘Here we are all
together’ for six weeks straight and
think that’s sustaining Christian faith.
“As a pastor over a four-year period I
started getting this twinge: Would this
celebration sustain and nourish this
congregation over a long period of time?
Does it accurately witness to it?”
The key to liturgical reform today,
the priest said, is the pastoral
practitioner who is trying to work out
the tension between making the liturgy
come from the people and using the
liturgy to draw people higher.
The function of the Liturgical
Conference, in those terms, he said, is
to:
-“Promote variety in celebration that
is aware of the tension between the
everyday and the call to be more than
what we are:
--‘‘Be a membership
organization . . .primarily a forum of
exchange among pastoral practitioners.”
He objected to the past
characterization of the conference by
some “as simply a coalition of liberal
position in the social field, in the
catechetical field, on every issue of
life.”
The Liturgical Conference
membership, he said, reflects a broad
spectrum of pastoral practitioners
bound by a common concern to help
develop a sound, effective liturgy in this
country.
The biggest need in this country
today is the ongoing training and
motivating of parish priests and parish
worship teams in developing good parish
liturgies, particularly with those priests
who are uncomfortable in their new role
as celebrant of an active, participating
liturgy,” he said.
“The Liturgical Conference will
continue to work on this problem, but
it does not have the resources to deal
with it - this calls for a massive,
concentrated effort across the United
States.
“But there is a second problem, that
even those who are motivated to
celebrate a meaningful liturgy have the
problem of trying to develop and
maintain a rich, sustaining liturgy. The
Liturgical Conference wants especially
to assist this group, primarily by serving
as a focus or forum of exchange among
pastoral practitioners who recognize the
problem.
“‘Pastoral practitioners’ means more
than just the pastor or parish priest - in
a good parish celebration you can’t have
just a priest, you have to have a
team . . .the parish staff or a lay liturgy
committee working with the pastor.”
Asked about the difficulty, expressed
by many liturgists today, of developing
adequate symbolism and ritual to
express the faith of the worshipping
community today, Father Funk
admitted that “liturgically, we’re
infants.”
But that is not surprising, he said.
“Why would we expect us to remake
the signs (symbolism and ritual) of 400
years in just 10 years?” he asked,
referring to the liturgy established at the
16th-century Council of Trent.
In recent centuries the Catholic
liturgy “appealed almost totally
nonverbally,” he said. “Now we have
moved to the rational and lost the sense
of ritual, but we are moving back
toward ritual.”
The questions of developing adequate
symbolism and ritual, he said, is at the
heart of the problem in liturgy today.
“We’re as good a lover as we are a
sign-maker. Somehow, learning to make
signs is what being mature is. Making
Atlantans Attend National Cursillo Encounter
BY MARIE MULVENNA
Over 500 leaders of the Cursillo
movement, including five Atlanta
laymen and Father Richard Kieran,
spiritual director of the Atlanta
Secretariat, took part in a week long
national encounter held at Findlay,
Ohio.
Delegates from nearly 100 dioceses
throughout the United States heard
speakers challenge the movement to
“come to full stature,” to look outside
the mechanics of the movement and
project Cursillo into the world. “Drop
the trappings and get down to serious
work,” they were told, as they took
part in seminars and discussion groups
related to the encounter theme “The
Evangelization of Environments.”
Atlanta representatives were Don
Nye, chairman of the Atlanta
Secretariat, Ignacio Abella, Lourdes
Abella, Pat Dotson and Don Lisinski.
Gerald Hughes of Dallas, national
coordinator of the movement, said the
movement’s leadership felt that Cursillo
might be showing signs of becoming
“ingrown, of being caught up in
organizational activities and
mechanics.” The movement was
designed to explore opportunities to
“take the movement into the
environments in which we live, work,
and socialize,” said Hughes.
Speakers at the national program
emphasized the de-Christianizing aspects
of modem society and challenged
delegates to adapt and project the
movement into the world as an
instrument of the Church with the
eursillista seen as bringing Christianity
into the professions and lives outside
their own families and churches.
Most Rev. Carroll T. Dozier, Bishop
of Memphis, urged delegates to face a
choice of standing still, thereby falling
behind a rapidly changing society, or
leading into the future. He told the
Assembled Cursillo leaders that they
must look on the Church as a sacrament
and a sign of the union between God
and mankind, as an instrument of
achievement of union and unity. A man
does not convey Christ’s message,
Bishop Dozier noted, by signing a check
or working on a board of directors of a
charitable institution, but rather “by
your hand touching the sick, by our
hand feeding the poor.”
Bishop Dozier emphasized a major
Cursillo theme that salvation is not an
individual matter between man and God
but rather can be “accomplished in
union with others and with God.”
Most Rev. Maurice J. Dingman,
Bishop of Des Moines, said the Church
was rapidly progressing from being
“introspective and inward looking” to
being “open to the joys and the hopes,
the griefs and the anxieties of the men
of this age.”
Bishop Dingman said that “giving
particular attention to the world in
which we live” is a characteristic sign of
the Church since Vatican II. He said he
felt that God had presented the
American Catholic Church with the
important mission of contributing to
the welfare of the universal Church,
stating that he believes the American
Church can exercise the kind of
leadership required to make this
contribution.
Father William R. Callahan, S. J.,
presented a keynote address during the
session covering the conflict between
structures and attitudes. He challenged
his listeners to get involved with and
take action to transform structures,
such as politics, which have not truly
reflected Christian ideals.
Father Callahan said the Church has
long talked about justice, but has not
done enough to achieve it. “When we
pick up burdens ourselves, others will
pick up the burden with us,” he said.
signs that communicate is the difference
between a child and an adult - the child
can’t make signs at a certain stage that
an adult can.
“We have to work at sign-making, and
the appropriate group is not the
history-of-liturgy people (who can tell
you what mistakes you might make),
but the person with the raw data, the
pastoral practitioner.”
Asked about the stance of the
Liturgical Conference, as a membership
organization, vis-a-vis the hierarchy,
Father Funk pointed out that the
conference did not want to be an
official body.
“We fought for a recognition that we
had an independent voice,” he said,
“but I’m not interested in stridently
proclaiming that independent voice.
“What I am interested in . . .is a quiet
tolerance on the part of the American
hierarchy, as it tolerates but does not
endorse other national groups such as
the National Conference of Catholic
Charities or the NCEA (National
Catholic Educational Association).
“We don’t see ourselves any more
outside the pale of authority than those
groups are.. .We’re very much
interested in helping the American
hierarchy, the American Church, in its
growth and development in the liturgy.
“We’re enthusiastically dedicated to
that.”
REPAIR TIME at the Cathedral of Christ the King
finds plenty of scaffolding surrounding the Cathedral’s
familiar stained glass windows. The windows, victims
of old age and the elements, are being restored to their
original state. The work is now more than half
completed.
Day Camp for Southside Youth
children and works during the regular
school year as director of the day care
center for the Trinity AME Church on
Lyndhurst Drive. A member of St.
Paul’s parish, she exudes an air of
delight at the success of the summer
program and with the parish as a whole.
The camp came into being four years
ago increasing its initial membership of
50 annually until it reached a peak of
300 children during the first two weeks
of the current season. The youthful
participants are members of St. Paul’s
parish, members of other denominations
and residents of various areas of
campers, Mrs. Boone said the camp
receives 36 underprivileged children
from Economic Opportunity Atlanta as
well as several workers paid by the
Model Cities office.
Friday is a very particular day at the
camp with specially planned trips to
local attractions such as Stone
Mountain, Lake Spivey and other areas
surrounding Atlanta. “Very often,” says
Mrs. Boone, “the children get to see
someplace they might otherwise never
know existed.” Due to the popularity of
(Continued on page 6)
OFFICIAL
Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan has announced the following
priestly assignments:
Reverend Eugene J. Driscoll, S.J.
Assistant, Our Lady of the Assumption Church
Reverend Thomas Hickey, C.SS.R.
Assistant, Sacred Heart Church in Griffin
SUMMER’S FUN according to these enthusiastic program. Over 230 youngsters take part in
campers at St. Paul of the Cross Summer Day Camp multi-faceted program each day at the parish.
BY MARIE MULVENNA
Each morning at 8:30 sharp, some
238 bright-eyed youngsters converge on
St. Paul of the Cross parish for another
day of fun, music, sports, learning and
Christian living. Now in its fourth year,
the summer day camp at St. Paul’s is a
thriving and dynamic daily “must” for
hundreds of school age children and the
weekly agenda of camp activities is
surely a welcome respite from the “lazy,
hazy days of summer.”
Mrs. AR’Gnes Boone, director of the
camp, radiates the enthusiasm of the
whole program as she rattles off the list
of special projects, field trips and
weekly jaunts to special places. But
above her enthusiasm for the camp’s
popular program is one guiding aspect,
her love of children. She says with a
beaming smile, “I just love children,”
adding, “that’s one of those old cliches I
suppose, but it’s true, I do love working
with them.” She is quick to state that,
in her opinion, there is no such thing as
an ugly child. “The ugliest child in the
world with a tear on his face is sheer
beauty.”
Mrs. Boone is a year round fan of