How Do We Operate?

Holy Firehose  Church– How Do We Operate/Proceed?

Other than parish priests who are now charged with its implementation, we have not come across Catholics this year that buy into its recent focus. The Catholic Church has revised its Missal and wants all Catholics around the world, at services, to use the old, literal Greek and Latin translations of prayers and responses during the services. It sadly is a pathetic denial of its recent history and current problems, an obliviousness to its enormous opportunities and resources to move on those opportunities, and a tacit acceptance of the blindness, deafness and ignorance that so aptly describes our current faith communities across the land. Our media, our politics and our culture is rampant with evil content and our local and global justice measures are tanking, but we have to use the right spelling of our prayer words, no matter what bombs are shattering our neighborhoods.

What do most of our faith communities / parishes do on a weekly basis? Some of them run parochial schools. Most have a complex set of ministries and commissions and prayer/study groups that meet during the week. On the weekends, on Saturday evenings and Sundays, they hold Masses and worship services. When we think about it, nearly all of the week-long activities are taken for granted, and none of it is part of the weekend services. This is an amazing disconnect!

Most of the Sunday services have homilies packaged by the archdiocese. The songs are designed/outlined by the archdiocese. The themes of the services are mostly framed by the scripture readings defined by the Roman church officials for that weekend on a 3 year rotating cycle. Unfortunately, this leaves out most of the real world! It leaves out most of the community activity going on all around us. AND . . . . it leaves out most of the real problems, needs, evils and opportunities around us too.

Shouldn’t we do things differently to build the contemporary Church??

We are trying to build a more meaningful and appealing framework for operating as a church. We are convinced it cannot be a top-down operation. We need to appeal to young and old, rich and poor, We cannot be told what to pray, what to sing, what you are to learn or memorize today. It cannot be based on Dogma. Maybe principles. Start with loving relationships and virtues. Scripture has its place. Music and the arts, absolutely. Lots of arts. Real neighborhood problems and opportunities. Actual programs and efforts reviewed and celebrated, EVERY WEEK. Scriptural scholar inputs on readings is fine, but we profess that the spirit of the Lord is in each one of us. We should tap, then, each one of us at our services to see what and how the Lord is manifesting the grace and wisdom that we need right now.

All your thoughts are welcome. Let’s build this together!