Common Catholic Prayers

Church takes steps into social media

When it comes to social networking, some Catholics are slow to click the “like” button. To read recent headlines, you might think the church is sticking to stone tablets: “Facebook and Christianity a bad mix, parish warns” and “Alabama church bans social networking with minors.”

But for every St. John Cantius Church, a Chicago parish whose leaders warned of the dangers of Facebook in its bulletin in April, there is an Old St. Patrick’s, a Chicago parish that uses Facebook and Twitter to alert more than 2,000 followers to its upcoming summer festival and other events. And though policies against teachers and students “friending” one another are becoming common at both Catholic and public schools, even Pope Benedict XVI has his own YouTube channel to connect with young Catholics.

Hardly known for the speed with which it adopts modern technology, the church is surely, but slowly, joining the masses on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. There are now more social network accounts than there are people in the world, and thousands belong to Catholic clergy, sisters, parishes, schools, publications and other organizations.

Used properly, social networking sites can help Catholics communicate and build community, says Lisa Hendey, who gives workshops on Catholic new media and was one of 150 Catholics worldwide invited to a Vatican meeting for bloggers in May.

“So many of our parishes, unfortunately, are places where people show up Sunday morning and then during the rest of the week never really think about their connection to church,” Hendey told 360 people logged in for a webinar on “Digital Ministry and Social Media” on April 26. “Using these tools will really help us to bring a sense of community that can inspire and lead the faithful more toward God and each other the other six days of the week.”

The webinar was hosted by Ave Maria Press in association with the National Conference for Catechetical Leadership and National Association for Lay Ministry.

Merely hosting an up-to-date Web site for a parish or other Catholic organization is no longer enough, Hendey says. With relatively little financial investment and a part-time, tech-savvy volunteer or staff member, parishes could and should be connecting and promoting themselves on Facebook and Twitter, offering online video and podcasting on YouTube or other sites, sharing photos among members using Flickr or a similar site, and sending e-blasts and texts to their members who have smart phones.

Aidan Nichols: The Ordinariates, the Pope, and the Liturgy (Part ...

But when they come, how will they worship?  Here we must treat of the Ordinariates and the question of the Liturgy.   Most (suitably informed) people when they hear the phrase ‘the liturgical patrimony of Anglicanism’ will think among other things of robed choirs, harvest festivals, change-ringing, and the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.  Above all, however, they will think of Thomas Cranmer.  But precisely this causes a problem, not merely because Queen Mary’s judiciary had him burned as a heretic but also (and more especially) because, for recent scholarship, Cranmer belongs firmly in the camp of the Protestant Reformers not least when it comes to his liturgical creations.   Cranmer wrote masterly prose, solemn, though with a tenderness the more poignant for being occasional.  Many of his phrases have passed over into the common treasury of the English language, and his better known prayers, or echoes of them, have come to mind for thousands of English people at critical moments of life.  But the transposition of his work into a Catholic setting is deeply problematic, above all in what concerns his Order of worship for the Eucharist, since it is in the Eucharistic Order, as I’ve already had occasion to mention in connexion with Pope Benedict’s theology, that the heart of Christian Liturgy consists.

There can be little doubt that the Order of Holy Communion in the English Prayer Book tradition – starting with 1549, and moving through 1552 to 1559 where some slight recovery of Catholic ground was modestly extended in 1662 – is hostile to ideas of Eucharistic Sacrifice and even Eucharistic Presence.  At the high point of radical Protestant influence, under Edward VI, it appears to have been because Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, a conservative on the Edwardine bench of bishops, argued that the First Prayer Book was susceptible of a Catholic interpretation that Cranmer determined to embark on making a more thorough job of it in 1552.  The great Anglo-Catholic liturgiologist Dom Gregory Dix describes in the final chapter of his The Shape of the Liturgy his own dismay on looking into the context of the two Edwardine Prayer Books in Cranmer’s other theological writings.