Morning Catholic must-reads: 25/01/13

‘Joseph Shaw worries that “the world of lay Catholic associations is not in especially good shape“.’

A worry expressed just a little to late, I expect – most Sodalities, Societies, Third Orders, and Lay Apostolates (still extant in 1965) are already extinct or on the danger list. The New Order of lay involvement for the life of the Church in the 1970′s demanded (or imposed) innovative liturgical direction, priest-replacement or a ‘political voice’; this was the active participation – it asserted – that the spirit of Vat II required. So the ‘Folk Group’, ‘We Are Church’, ‘Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Christian Group’ et al are the type of lay Catholic associations that have been long favoured in the Age of Aquarius ecclesiology circles (look at the Redemptorists in Ireland, the Magisterium of Nuns clique so long dominant on the US, even less impressively – dear God forgive us – the saecularising of the Third Order of Saint Francis .. as if any Franciscan can be seen as ‘worldly’, even in thoughtless re-naming: Saecular Order of Franciscans etc).

Catholic Action has always been problematic for the protest-led, reform-minded ministers; after all, in reality, it rarely advanced beyond one or two heroically dedicated souls liberally sprinkled across parishes, and the good souls who endeavoured to assist them – and that was in its heyday between the late 1880s and the late 1960s. 

Yet they do exist, in part and only mirrored, today; my favourite examples are: ‘Totus Tuus’ – a wonderfully understated e-world apostolate from the Westminster Rosary Group, the ‘Little Way Association’ – for charity in the developing world, ‘CTS’, ‘SVP’, the marvellous ‘Aid to the Church in Need’ and the still amazing ‘Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice’.

Look only at the last example, the Old School heroine of faithful witness, Daphne McLeod; the trials imposed upon her sterling association – the scorn with which her group’s efforts have met from much of the clergy – speaks volumes of the ‘association’ church leaders have in mind as worthy.

http://www.proecclesia.com/page_free%20talks.htm