Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Newspapers are publishing The Year in Review. Because I was on the Camino, I missed the stories about the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey that came out in September.
45% of Catholics believe the Eucharist is merely symbolic, and not the real body and blood of Christ. 
Of Catholics 40% could name the four Gospels; of Hispanic [...]

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Deleted until I learn more about them. I had no idea they were so controversial. 

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Before I went on the Camino, I stayed in Paris a few days to go to the museums and to wait for my hiking poles to catch up with me (they never did). 
By coincidence, the hotel I stayed at (Henri IV, on the Left Bank) was a few meters from the church of St. Nicholas [...]

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 I tried to go to mass every evening on the Camino. Most churches have evening masses for the pilgrims. Oddly enough, Sunday was the hard day – the sole village mass was in the morning and there was no mass in the evening. But 9 days out of 10 I was able to go to [...]

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At one point in my peregrinations, I drove from Bozeman to Kalispell. The radio stations offered three choices: Country and Western, Christian, and Christian Country and Western. I listened to each as long as I could stand it: Rollin in my Sweet Baby’s Arms (when does the mail train come back?), Yes We’ll Gather by [...]

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Commonweal is having a discussion in the decades-old topic “Why Catholics Can’t (or Won’t) Sing.” 
The lack of singing at Mass is a symptom that the liturgical renewal was not a popular movement: it was developed by a small group of enthusiasts and scholars and imposed on the laity without any consultation. Catholics have a strong [...]

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The liturgical wars continue over the new proposed new translation.  
I have noticed that the current translation is marked by a preference for general language which obscures the biblical references. The Roman liturgy is a tissue of quotations and allusions to the Bible, and biblical language tends to be concrete rather than abstract: how beautiful are [...]

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As someone suggested in the comments, it might be better from a moral point of view to have the priest and the people facing the same way. 
I think that main problem with having the priest face the people is that it feeds narcissism to be aware that all eyes are on you, and too many [...]

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The discussion over at dotCommonweal reveals at attitude toward marriage that it is private affair which the couple should be able to celebrate in their own way. 
In the Western Church, following Roman law, the essence of marriage is considered the mutual consent of the spouses. The priest is only a witness, and his presence was [...]

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Bishop R. Nickless of Sioux City has written a letter to his diocese: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda.
 
In it he denounces the false method of interpreting the Second Vatican Council: 

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the [...]

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Priests who crack jokes during the Divine Liturgy are on my little list, and none of them will be missed. I know that priests have long been given the bad advice to begin the sermon with a joke to crack the ice with the congregation – but a sermon is not public speaking at a [...]

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As the Catholic bishops in the United States are discovering, it is much harder to tighten discipline than to loosen it, as any teacher or parent could have told them. For decades, over a generation, the bishops did nothing to publicly rebuke or discipline Catholic politicians who want abortion to be legal. Catholics got the [...]

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In 1912, a member of the Church and Religion Forward Movement complained that trained choirs were replacing congregational singing and were becoming a form of religious entertainment. He added 

What is worse than that is this: That in this tendency to aestheticism, we have brought within the pale of the church—may we blush for it—a kind [...]

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