SIR – With regard to Fr David Palmer’s query about Alpha (Letter, September 15) I would like to ask him if he has heard of the Cursillo movement. This was developed after long and careful trials on the island of Majorca, but has subsequently spread across the world. It contains everything he asks for and more.
It consists of a three-day course with a local follow-up. It is lay-led with active support from clergy and Religious. Parish clergy in this country tend to fight shy of it as they think it will involve them in activities beyond their capacity. But in parishes where Cursillo has been embraced the parish priest discovers that not only is his congregation larger and more committed, but also that he has more volunteers.
I encountered the Cursillos in Christianity in Holland in 1982. I had been a Catholic for some years and was still searching for my place in the Church. I was invited by the American Nato chaplain to join him on a course he was supporting the following weekend, and my life changed forever. The years that followed were some of the best and most fulfilled in a very interesting life. I am so grateful for the exposure to life lived in Christ in Christian community, for talents discovered and hitherto unused skills put into action for the service of the Good Lord and His Church.
Cursillo was born in the 1940s for a very different Church. What is taught is still relevant and so needed today. But the time commitment, etc, needs some work to make it more acceptable for today’s busy lifestyles.
Anne Morgan-Jones (Mrs)
Calne, Wiltshire
SIR – Richard Ingrams’s “Don’t stop the music” (Notebook, September 22) is among those (many) Herald articles that one instantly wants to download and send to as many friends as possible. Its great claim, nothing if not evangelistic, is that “classical” music is a moral force that gives us “a glimpse of another world beyond this one”.
I personally do not understand how anyone who loves music could not agree, but presumably there are lots of atheists out there who happily listen to music but deny that they are undergoing any kind of religious experience. One of the questions raised by the article, moreover, is whether the ability to respond to music can be taught, and taught to the wider public, or whether to respond to it you just have to have a certain “calling”, or a certain kind of imagination.
I am always glad when, in the Divine Office, Saturday Week 2 comes round again, with Psalm 91(92) affirming: “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to make music to your name, O Most High.” Today, if not in the time of King David, the music will (or should) mean one of the composers that Mr Ingrams mentions. Or one that he does not, such as Haydn, Bruckner, Dvořák or even Messiaen, all of whom were devout Catholics. Or Sibelius, who does not come in that category, but whose symphonies always affect my imagination in a special way, without my being able to explain why.
David Jowitt
University of Jos, Nigeria
sir – Mary Kenny (September 22) need no longer dread the thought of yet another personal, if not painful, examination of conscience during the Penitential Rite each time Mass begins, now that the words “call to mind our sins” have been replaced (since Advent 2011) with the more
literal “acknowledge our sins”.
The present translation of the Roman Missal, for all its perceived shortcomings, is an improvement in this instance – at least, where the English “acknowledge” is more faithful to the Latin agnoscamus, and is a simple invitation to recognise the fact that we have sinned, so that we may better prepare ourselves to celebrate the Eucharist.
Fr Colum Clerkin
Culmore, Derry
SIR – Even good Christians sometimes set party, race, class or gender above Christ’s Church. So it’s good news that Catholic Labour MPs propose to stand up for Catholic social teaching (Home News, September 29).
Every party preaches some Catholic principles, such as the common good or the living wage. But apart from the occasional Jacob Rees-Mogg, no MP dares voice unfashionable Catholic truths. Labour Catholics’ first challenge? Their party’s manifesto has now endorsed the long-running atheist campaign to hamstring Catholic education.
Other Catholic social principles want championing: the family as the basic unit of society, for instance. Family rights transcend both individual interests in an individualist age, and state interests. Although the social encyclicals equally disown unchecked greed and state ownership of all means of production, they collide with the Marxist tenet “property is theft”.Rerum Novarum says it plainly: “Everybody has a natural right to own property as their own.”
Leo XIII saw property as an essentially human right. Against Marxism, we might point also to the general animal need for exclusive territory. But domestic property is in crisis because it guarantees profits above inflation. Not only does the manifesto not address this, it also proposes to build council houses – with no right to purchase.
Conservatism has never equitably achieved its Catholic-sounding ideal of a property-owning democracy. If Labour’s Rees-Moggs speak out enough, the party could change course and manage just that. As a great Catholic writer [Hilaire Belloc] put it: we must have property or slavery; there is no third issue.
Tom McIntyre
Frome, Somerset
SIR – “The Latin Mass served a very practical purpose …” Hear hear, I say to Ann Widdecombe in her interesting piece entitled “What Catholic tourists need” (September 15).
In the 1960s I was in the Merchant Navy, sailing mainly to the Far East and Australia, and going to Mass when possible, ie in port and not working. It was so consoling and satisfying (spiritually and mentally) to be so far from home and yet following the Mass either in my head or in my Latin (and English) missal – in Kobe and Yokohama, Singapore and Hong Kong, Manila, Sydney and Melbourne and so on – though a Melbourne sermon in Ukrainian was a bit difficult.
In 1963 I took a break to go to university in Leeds and was suddenly hit by the new English Mass, unaware that the Church had been planning for it. (How much did it consult the laity
on this?)
I have never fully recovered from the subsequent years, being, for some time, made to feel a schismatic or “revisionist”. Why, oh why, wasn’t the “old” Mass officially retained from the beginning alongside the new so that the likes of myself could re-charge their spiritual batteries as effectively as in the years before … and tourists could attend the Mass they were familiar with?
John Rogers
Nantymoel, Bridgend
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.