Essays in Theology

The U.S. Catholic bishops have produced a new introduction to their 2007 document, "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship." The full text of the new introduction is available in Origins, Oct. 13, 2011, vol. 41, no. 19. The original document is also available in Origins, Nov. 29, 2007, vol. 37, no. 25.

There used to be an anti-liturgical joke circulating that said that the only difference between a terrorist and a liturgist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist.

By the same token, there is a seriously mistaken impression abroad that the new translation of the missal was inspired and promoted by liturgists. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The research team, commissioned by The National Catholic Reporter (NCR), which included William D'Antonio of The Catholic University of America (CUA), Mary Gautier of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University and Michele Dillon of the University of New Hampshire, recently completed the fifth survey of U.S. Catholics.

I don't know how the new, literal translation of the Mass, which went into effect on the First Sunday of Advent, was received by Catholics this weekend.

However, even if everything went smoothly in most parishes, Catholics, and especially pastors, had a right to complain about the high cost of purchasing new missals and other liturgical books.

There was no Thanksgiving column last year because, for the first time since I began writing this weekly column in early July 1966, I had to suspend it for about three months for medical reasons.

In 2009, however, I had done a column in thanksgiving for the greatest single asset to the Catholic church in the United States (and I almost certainly can include Canada here): the thousands of nuns who have served the church in so many extraordinary ways: in parishes, in schools, in hospitals, in shelters for women, in prisons, as college and university faculty members, chaplains, residence hall rectors and in so many other ministries, too many to count.

This Friday is the feast of Charles Borromeo, one of the most important bishops in the entire history of the church, one of the outstanding figures in the Catholic Reformation of the 16th century and patron saint of bishops, catechists and seminarians.

In my Labor Day column for this year, I chided the U.S. Catholic bishops for two reasons: for failing to apply Catholic social teaching to the issue of justice in the Church itself and for failing to defend the right of workers to form labor unions and to engage in collective bargaining, especially in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere.

Friday of this week, Oct. 7, is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. It provides an opportunity to review the origins and purpose of one of the most popular private devotions of the 20th century, and indeed ever since the reported apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with rosary in hand, to St. Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858.

Many Catholics and media people -- at least those with enough interest to care -- believe that the late Pope John Paul I must have had the shortest pontificate of all time. Not so. John Paul I is generally regarded as having had the 11th shortest pontificate in all of papal history: 33 days.