✣ Highlights from the week online
A Eucharistic parish grows at speed The Catholic News Service told the story of a San Francisco parish which has transformed itself. Three years after Fr Joseph Illo was appointed at Star of the Sea, Mass attendance and parish membership have both risen by 10 per cent each year. Eva Muntean, who organises the parish’s street evangelisation, says: “For the first time in my life, I feel I belong to a parish, I mean really belong.” Another parishioner says: “I was fading from the faith and now I am back … I know so many people in the parish and it makes me so joyful.” So what is the secret? Fr Illo says: “We want to base the renewal of our parish around the Holy Eucharist.” He has done this by paying special attention to beautiful music (Gregorian chant), and by reception of the Eucharist kneeling at the Communion rail. There is a focus on the priesthood: altar service is seen as a preparation for priesthood, so it is boys-only. Many Masses are celebrated ad orientem (facing east). There is also “a new Knights of Columbus chapter, revitalised homeless outreach, Gabriel Project for pregnant women in need, a young adults group, and a speaker and a film series as well as Filipino and Chinese parish groups,” the report said. The most potent force against racist violence The Charlottesville violence prompted Joseph Pearce to recall his own “battle-scarred past” as an angry neo-Nazi. “In those days, I relished the violence, hoping for a full-blown race war,” he wrote at the National Catholic Register. He was rescued from hateful extremism by two forces. The first was “authentic reason”. Discovering the works of GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and, while in prison, Thomas Aquinas, helped him “perceive reality as something much bigger than the pathetic world of racist ideology”. The other force was love. Encountering a hated enemy and finding only love and friendship “sowed seeds of healing in my hate-battered heart”. Love, he said, is a “powerful weapon against our enemies”. This is the challenge after Charlottesville, Pearce said. “We should not demonise the white supremacist or the abortionist, but should love them into submission,” he wrote. What the crucifix says about God – and us The author of thoughtfullycatholic.wordpress.com defended the Catholic practice of using crucifixes (whereas many Protestants prefer a bare cross.) One important reason is that “we see the wound we have made in His Sacred Heart. We see, too, the Crown of Thorns we have driven into His skull causing His sight of us to be obscured by the Precious Blood which we have shed.” So we learn that we will remain in our sins, harming others and ourselves, unless we “repent and accept that poor battered man hanging before our eyes into our hearts as our Guide, Teacher and Master”.
