Full, conscious and active participation...

Photo: Dupont Media World (Click on image for larger version)

The name Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ may not be familiar to you unless you have been following the story of post-Conciliar liturgy for the past 30 years. And if you've followed that story you know that Sr. Kathleen is a scholar, teacher, author, speaker and lover of that reality in our lives we call the liturgy.

Last month, Kathleen was a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, held in Detroit. I highly recommend the text of her address for your study - particularly if you haven't had an opportunity to follow the liturgy's history since the early 1960's.

Her talk is entitled Hope and Harmony and has three parts: The Context; Grounding Hope in Our Recent Context; and The Future. In that last section she offers a new interpretation of full, conscious and active participation in the liturgy and concludes the whole presentation with "nine concrete choices we can make right now, choices within our immediate control, choices in the present which may help us create the future we hope for..."

In that conclusion Sister Hughes offers some nitty-gritty advice for us as we prepare to incorporate the texts of the new Missal into the liturgical life of our parishes. You may be tempted to jump to the end to read those nine points but I assure you that their full content will escape you without having read them in the context of the whole talk.

If you have (or are forming) opinions about the new translation of the Roman Missal, take the time to read and ponder Sr. Kathleen Hughes' wisdom.


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