Safety and Reverence: How Roman Catholic Liturgy Can Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a major challenge for many religious denominations. The Roman Catholic Church strongly depends on physical communal worship and sacraments. Disagreements grow concerning the best balance between safety and piety. To address this issue, I review the major transmission risks for the SARS-CoV-2 virus and list certain measures to enhance the safety of the Roman Catholic Liturgy without compromising its intrinsic beauty and reverent spiritual attitude. This can be achieved through assimilation of several traditional elements into the modern liturgy. I emphasize that religious leadership and decision-making should be transparent and based on inclusiveness, pluralism, best scientific evidence and voluntary cooperation.

Mass Intentions: Twentieth-Century Theology and Pastoral Reform [Part Two]

The question of Mass intentions received a good deal of theological scrutiny in the course of the twentieth century, especially in the work of Maurice de la Taille, Karl Rahner, and Edward Kilmartin. Each of these theologians criticized the widely accepted Scotist three-fold division of the fruits of the Mass. Combined with the post-Vatican II reform of the Catholic liturgy and further contemporary reflection in Eucharistic theology, these advances provide the basis for a proposal to re-think the practice of Mass intentions as well as monetary offerings (stipends) associated with them. [ Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. This first was published in the December 2020 issue.]

On the Touch-Event

This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.

Aggiornamento on Campus

Beginning in 1960, William Blase Schauer, a Dominican friar of the Province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, developed innovative ideas for telling a story to disengaged college students of the fundamental relationship between Catholic worship (Mass and domestic rituals) and its cultural heritage—its rich tradition of art, music, and theater. Using the themes of symbol, season, and heritage, he capitalized on the catechetical nature of the liturgy in order to draw them back more deeply into their Catholic faith. With initial success in Las Cruces, he transferred the “experiment” to Santa Fe where it achieved national success in educating clergy and parish leaders about Catholic liturgy and culture.

Sléttsöngur í lútherskum sið á Íslandi 1550–1800

Plainchant originated within the Roman-Catholic liturgy, but continued to be sung in Lutheran church services alongside more recent hymns from Germany. This article discusses the sources for plainchant in Iceland after the year 1550, both printed books and manuscripts. The Icelandic Graduale (the official missal of the Icelandic church, first printed in 1594) contained a substantial number of such pieces, yet did not fully adhere to the Danish Graduale, published in 1573. In some cases, the Icelandic bishop chose different chants altogether, while other chants were sung in Icelandic, to a far greater extent than seems to have been the case in Denmark or Germany. This suggests that the Icelandic Lutheran chant tradition was partly fuelled by a local interest in producing ambitious translations, including alliteration and end rhyme not always found in the original texts. A substantial number of chants not found in Icelandic printed books have survived in local manuscripts. They include chants possibly derived from the medieval Nidaros tradition, as well as chants from the Danish hymnal (1569) and Graduale, which were transmitted via manuscripts in Icelandic translations well into the eighteenth century.

Liturgical Theology before 1600

Liturgical interpretation is the analysis of public worship using the methods of patristic and medieval scriptural exegesis. It was a central part of Scottish religious culture and education before 1560 and popular among clerics committed to Catholic Reform. Wishart and Knox’s Reformed critique of Catholic ceremonial made liturgical interpretation an important part of mid-sixteenth-century debate. While Protestant and Catholic liturgy and theology differed greatly, both sides used the same method to interpret their worship and this, meaning that the Reformation divide in Scotland was not as wide as the protagonists claimed, has historical and ecumenical implications.