Davidson CCM: Bulletin week of Sep 29

Today is the feast day of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the patron saint of St. Therese Church in Mooresville. Therese was born in Lisieux, France in 1873. At the age of 15 she received dispensation to join the Discalced Carmelite community where her two older sisters were already nuns. Therese was only 24 when she died in 1897 of tuberculosis, but her fame spread quickly with the posthumous publication of her memoir (which her superior directed her to write), called The Story of a Soul. She was canonized in 1925, less than three decades after her death. In 1997, she was declared a Doctor of the Church.

Therese’s enduring contribution to the Church,  was what she called “the Little Way,” a simple and practical way of understanding the path to sanctity in which every ordinary act of daily life is an act of God’s love, and every suffering, from the petty insults of daily to life to terminal illness, an opportunity to join in Christ’s redemptive work of the salvation of souls. She believed that the Little Way could transform the most ordinary life into an arena of holiness, and by causing a small ripple could transform the world. Many miracles have been attributed to her, and she once said “After my death I will let fall a shower of roses. I will spend my heaven in doing good upon the earth.”

Happy Birthday, Pope Francis!

At the end of this bulletin, you’ll find a FAQ from our first Catholicism 101 session, about liturgy.

~ Karen

FAQ…. What is “liturgy”?

• The word liturgy comes from Greek, leitourgia; laos means people, and ergon means work. Leitourgia referred to a public work performed by the people and for the people, generally as a sign of piety (eg, building a hospital to honor Aescepulus). When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the same word was used to refer to Jewish worship, and was also applied by the early Christian community to its own worship.
• In Sacrosanctum Concilium (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), one of the documents of Vatican II, we are reminded that “the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the foundation from which all her power flows” (no. 10). Our Catholic faith is grounded in this belief that liturgy is the source and summit of our lives. This same document also calls for full, conscious active participation in the liturgy (SC 14).
• Furthermore, theologians from the earliest centuries of Christianity have understood that liturgy, how we pray as a community, is what grounds our theology, what we believe as a community. This is traditionally expressed as lex orandi, lex credendi, or the rule of praying establishes the rule of believing; that is, what we say about God and the Church flows out of how the Church prays to God (and vice versa). 
• The study of liturgy became a serious endeavor in the early 20^th century as scholars engaged in ressourcement, or a rediscovery of early Church historical and textual sources. Two important consequences of their inquiry was the understanding that the Church’s liturgy has changed over time, and that it has looked quite different in different cultures.
• Starting from this definition of people + work, we can say a number of things about liturgy, that distinguish it from other ways of praying.
• It is the people’s work, not simply the priests’
• It is public, not private (watching mass on TV is not participating in liturgy)
• It is relational and not individualistic—it’s about the community gathered together, not “me and Jesus”
• It is directed to God and initiated by God, so it’s not simply a human endeavor
• It is ecclesial, meaning “of the official Church” and not an independent group’s prayers
• It is a human activity and is therefore situated in a particular time and culture
• It is planned and formal, not ad hoc
• It is active, not passive—it’s work—and it is an action, not a thing and certainly not words written in a book (rubrics)
• We are most familiar with “liturgy” in the context of mass—the Liturgy of the Mass, with its subdivisions of the “liturgy of the Word” and the “liturgy of the Eucharist.” But the Church also has the Liturgy of the Hours, the cycle of daily prayers of the church.

___________________

Karen Soos
Associate Chaplain and Catholic Campus Minister
Davidson College
Campus Box 7196
Davidson NC 28035
704. 894. 2423