God's People Need Time to Unwind Mystery of Liturgy,Chicago

God’s people need time to unwind mystery of liturgy CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – God’s people need time to unwind the mystery of the liturgy, both during Mass and over time, said Cardinal Godfried Danneels during a lecture at Boston College April 17. Cardinal Danneels, the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Belgium, was co-author of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (“Sacrosanctum Concilium”), approved by the Second Vatican Council. It called for the translation of the Mass from Latin to the vernacular. The document, promulgated Dec. 4, 1963, ordered an extensive revision of worship so that people would have a clearer sense of their own involvement in the Mass and other rites. The cardinal spoke at the annual Canisius Lecture, sponsored by the university’s Jesuit Institute. His talk was titled “The Sacred Liturgy: Revisiting ‘Sacrosanctum Consilium’ Forty Years After Vatican II.” “The liturgy needs time to deliver its riches,” he said to students, faculty and priests. The faithful need time and space to enter into the event and to leave the chaos of the world behind, and to do that they also need silence, according to the cardinal. The current length of the Mass makes the liturgy an “unstoppable succession of words” with little time for reflection, he said. If the liturgy is too focused on the intellectual, it will fail to reach many of the people who participate in it, he said. The liturgy also calls for repetition because it reveals its significance over time, Cardinal Danneels said. “Our contemporaries often conceive understanding as the ability to grasp something at first hearing,” he said. “Many changes in the liturgy in order to make it understandable have been inefficient because they focus too much on the immediate cognitive informative aspect of understanding. “They wanted to explain everything immediately to provide the commentary and to analyze. They never lead to the reality of the liturgy,” he said. What can be grasped immediately is cognitive understanding, he said, but the divine reality cannot be realized so easily. The realities of love, death and joy cannot be understood all at once upon first inspection, he said. Cardinal Danneels also spoke about the major changes the liturgy has undergone in the last 40 years. “It must be very difficult to imagine for those who have not experienced it for themselves, just how much liturgical practice has changed in the last half century,” he said. Prior to the renewal of Vatican II, there was a divide between the priest celebrating the Mass and the faithful gathered, he added. “It being frequently the case that priests celebrated official liturgy while at one and the same time, the people set about their personal devotions,” he said. “The people assisted, of course, but took little time or little or no part in the liturgy itself.” The aim of the liturgical movement, which originated in Belgium, was to initiate active participation for laypeople. With the use of the vernacular, the Mass became more transparent, but problems still existed, he said. The Bible uses language from a “bygone era,” the cardinal said, and verses speak of shepherds and their flocks, which are no longer the realities of daily life. Rather than change the symbols used in texts, the symbols must be explained within their historical context, he said, and in the same way words like Easter, Resurrection and the Eucharist cannot be replaced. They, like some words in the liturgy, must be learned, he said. Since Christian liturgy cannot be known from human experience alone, it demands catechesis, he said. The instruction must be done outside of the liturgy so that participants can experience the liturgy and then have it explained to them in greater depth, he said. Although reform was needed to invite the laity into full participation in the liturgy, there can be a “shadow side,” the cardinal added. The changes can lead to a “taking possession of the liturgy,” he said. “In some cases, this can lead to a sort of liturgical coup in which the sacred is eliminated, the language trivialized and the cult turned into a social event or a piece of theater,” he said. In these situations, the real subject of liturgy is no longer Christ, he said. Participants at Mass need to be oriented toward God with an attitude of receptivity, self-giving, praise and prayer. The liturgy is a “loving entering in,” he said. At the liturgy’s core is a mystery that must be accepted through openness and faith, he said, a mystery that God, through the Catholic Church, offers all people. “I see even in the secularized world we live in, the attention for liturgy and for symbols is growing and growing and growing,” he said. “Many people are looking for something more profound.” Chicago archdiocesan foster care program to end CHICAGO – Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago has begun dismantling its foster care program after announcing that it will stop providing foster care services as of June 30. The decision, which Catholic and state welfare officials called “tragic,” came after Catholic Charities was unable to get liability insurance for its foster care program. Catholic Charities and other private agencies recruit and train foster parents to be licensed by the state, place children with the foster parents they have trained, and provide monitoring, casework and social services to the children. When the closure was announced April 16, about 900 children were in the program, said April Specht, a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities. More than 150 staff positions are to be cut as well. The decision came after Catholic Charities was unsuccessful in finding liability insurance to cover the program. Its current carrier agreed to continue providing coverage of all of Catholic Charities’ services except foster care. The agency approached 25 providers besides its current carrier; 24 turned it down, and one did not respond, Ms. Specht said. The insurance company’s decision came after Catholic Charities settled a lawsuit over the alleged abuse of three children in a foster home in the 1990s for $12 million. The insurance company capped its liability at $10 million, and Catholic Charities had a $1 million retention fund, said Walter Ousley, Catholic Charities’ director of operations. That left the agency scrambling to come up with the rest of the money. Catholic Charities and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services both have formed transition teams to transfer the children and their foster parents to either the state agency or other private agencies that continue to work in partnership with the department, said Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the state agency. Catholic Charities hopes that some of its foster care workers also can move to the agencies that will work with their young charges, in essence moving children, parents and workers together as a block, Mr. Ousley said. Mr. Marlowe acknowledged that such a process would be ideal, providing the least disruption to the children, but said the agency cannot make any such guarantees. “DCFS recognizes that there is a great deal of skill, expertise and a high level of qualifications among the outgoing staff,” Mr. Marlowe told The Catholic New World, Chicago archdiocesan newspaper. “We wouldn’t want to lose the skill, care and love those people bring to child welfare.” Erwin McEwen, the acting director of the state agency, said it was a sad day in the history of child welfare in Illinois. “The reputation of Catholic Charities is excellent,” he said. “Their performance has been exemplary.” Staff members reacted to the news that the program would close with grief and shock, Mr. Ousley said, and with concern, above all, for the children. “They were concerned about the kids first,” he said. “Even though this is their livelihood.” Catholic Charities has been providing substitute care for children since 1921, and was among the agencies that advocated for the creation of the state’s Department of Children and Family Services in 1963. It has continued to advocate for the welfare of the state’s most vulnerable children since then, Mr. Marlowe said. In the meantime, Mr. Marlowe said, his agency will continue to work with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago to continue to provide services to children who live with their parents. The state is not worried about absorbing the foster children from Catholic Charities’ program into other programs. The number of children in residential or foster care in the state is about 16,000, down from a high of about 52,000 in 1998, so the state’s child welfare agencies have the capacity to take in these children. The drop in the number of children in foster care was the result of a concentrated effort and changes in federal law in the late 1990s to keep families together when possible, and to return children to their parents or make them eligible for adoption more quickly when they were taken into foster care. But while state law indemnifies the state agency from lawsuits, private agencies have no such protection in Illinois, one of only two states that do not protect private child welfare agencies working under contract to the government from lawsuits, Mr. Ousley said. Catholic Charities’ insurance carrier – whom Mr. Ousley would not name – provides coverage for foster care in 48 other dioceses, but none of them are vulnerable because they operate under different state laws. What happened to the first act? My family attended the Celebration of the Arts (CR, April 12) because I had an eighth- grade son who was performing with the Representation Band. This was my first experience with this evening and I was very amazed at the talent portrayed on the stage.

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