The Catholic Weekly 12 April 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 20 NEWS 12, April, 2020 NEWS Publisher issues free web RCIA course THIS IS the time of year par- ishes have been preparing to welcome new Catholics into the church through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but the coronavirus has changed how catechumens and candidates are participat- ing in RCIA. To prevent this pandemic from stopping these individu- als from pursing full entrance into the church, the Catholic publisher TAN Books has re- leased a free online version of the Credo RCIA program, which was developed in tan- dem with the Dominican friars at the Thomistic Insti- tute, based at the Dominican House of Studies in Washing- ton. Access to the YouTube vid- eos for each lesson and PDFs of both the catechist and cat- echumenmaterials are availa- ble online through TAN Books and the Thomistic Institute websites. Credo is a video program that “carefully teaches partic- ipants and catechumens the key tenets of the faith,” said a news release announcing on- line access. It is designed to be all-en- compassing and can be used with other RCIA programs so leaders can easily pick up wherever their participants left off. Credo can be streamed from anywhere. In RCIA, catechumens are those have never been bap- tised, and they receive bap- tism, confirmation and first Communion at the Easter Vigil. Candidates have al- ready been baptised in an- other Christian tradition, and they enter the church through a profession of faith, being confirmed and receiving the Eucharist. The institute has over 50 student chapters on campus- es across the US, in Dublin, London and Rome. For more information vis- it www.tanbooks.com/credo and www.thomisticinstitute. org - CNS IN ITALY, the Coronavirus emergency has revealed a need for prayer and a quest for spirituality that surprised many observers. Over 13 million Italians prayed from home by tuning in to Tv2000, the television of the Italian Bishops’ Confer- ence, a press release reported. Italy’s primary Catholic TV channel has been followed by millions of people, who have sought in the faith a way of consolation and reassurance in the face of fear. The Pope has granted inter- views to the TV channel, and they have had series featuring Pope Francis’ participation. ¾ ¾ Deborah Castellano Dissenting voice heard Station gets 13 million praying A new study of Dorothy Day poses questions just as relevant as in her lifetime THERE MUST have been more than a few raised eye- brows when in September 2015 Pope Francis, during his address to Congress, de- scribed Dorothy Day as one the greatest people of faith ever to come out of the US. With co-founder Peter Maurin, Day in 1933 set up the Catholic Worker Movement, the Catholic Worker news- paper and the first of a series of emergency shelters for the poorest of the poor of the De- pression-ravaged streets of New York City. Over the next nearly 50 years, Day would become an activist and an annoyance to the rich and powerful, and she remains a paradox for many Catholics 40 years after her death in 1980. A good deal of that mys- tery has been reconsidered in a new full-length biogra- phy, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by co-authors John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. Day, who was received into the Catholic Church in 1928 at age 30, flirted with mem- bership in the Communist Party in her youth, and later in life took pains to cloud over a hard-drinking, profligate life- style, which included affairs, arrests for taking part in pro- tests and an abortion. This new biography is more than a “warts and all” story of waywardness, conversion, dedication to the poor and hard-won redemption. The book also benefits from more of a sense of perspective than previous recountings of Day’s life and work. Two earlier biographies, Dorothy Day: A Biography (1982) by William Miller and Dorothy Day: A Radical De- votion (1987) by Robert Coles, consist largely of verbatim tape-recorded interviews with their subject interspaced with author commentary. Both authors were former volunteers with the Catholic ¾ ¾ Mike Mastromatteo Worker Movement and per- sonally familiar with Day dur- ing her lifetime. A third memoir, Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty (2017) by Day’s granddaughter Kate Hen- nessy, comes across more as prayerlike inspiration than deeply researched exegesis and interpretation. The Loughery-Randolph work meanwhile, has more to say about their subject’s lega- cy and its relevance to today’s believing Catholic or anyone concerned with the beati- tudes. Eschewing sentimentality and romanticism, Loughery and Randolph combine ex- tensive research, wide reading and effective use of primary source material to shed more light on perhaps the most significant but controversial lay Catholic in 20th-century America. Day’s involvement in pro- tests, peace marches and picketing between 1917 and her last arrest in 1975, became a source of scandal and em- barrassment to church lead- ers in her home New York Archdiocese. Owing however to the success of Day’s shelters and soup kitchens, especially during the Depression years, church leaders were loath to crack down on her efforts. Oddly enough, had the then cardinal-archbishop of New York ordered Day to close up shop, she would have obeyed without hesitation. It was another of the many paradoxes in Day’s life story. Despite having a deep mis- trust of all forms of authority, Day remained faithful and obedient to the church right down to the last letter. Despite Day’s complete ac- ceptance of the churchmagis- terium, she was never entirely comfortable with a tepid prac- tice of the faith. As authors Loughery and Randolph point out, “Dorothy Day in the war years could feel sickened by the state of Amer- ican Catholicism – namely, priests and their parishion- ers who purported to love Christ but lived their faith in a perfunctory way, happy consumers and dutiful patri- ots, always asking too little of themselves.” The authors suggest some naivete on Day’s part regard- ing her insistence on total pacifism, and her turning a blind eye to some of the worst abuses of communism. Nonetheless they extol her faith as unflinching effort to “live” the Beatitudes, knowing full well that hardship, suffer- ing, rejection and loneliness would test her resolve every step of the way. This new biography is use- ful to any Catholic – lay or ordained – who would like to reconsider their personal practice of the faith. The story of Day’s struggle takes on increased relevance since March 2000 when the Vatican announced the case for her beatification, perhaps ultimately leading to her be- ing named a saint. “Dorothy Day asked hard questions,” the biographers conclude. “Her every statement, her every protest in the street, her lifelong rejection of comfort and respectability, ask: What kind of world do we really live in, and what sacrifices are we willing to achieve it? Do we believe our primary con- cerns should be our physical ease, our family’s and nation’s well-being, our happiness as individuals? Can a sense of the mystical thrive in a culture that has made sacred causes of the rights of the individ- ual, material progress and technology? Is a flight from suffering and struggle a flight from God and an escape from the fulfillment of our deepest humanity? Day’s life suggests answers to those complex questions, though her an- swers offer little to please the skeptical, the covetous and the complacent.” - CNS Tv2ooo – which can be streamed worldwide also on the internet – has increased its schedule with new prayer ap- pointments, beginning with the 7am Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in Casa Santa Marta in the Vatican, which reached 12 per cent share peaks. A papal Mass of this kind has never been broadcast live on TV before. In millions of Italian homes, TVs remained on Channel 28, or on 157, on Sky, or tuned in through comput- ers, smartphones, and tablets connected to the streaming of the website: www.tv2000. it/live. Among the most success- ful religious events that have made Tv2000 a point of refer- ence for many faithful are (in Rome time): l the Pope’s Mass in San- ta Marta at 7am; the 8:30am Mass aired from the chapel of the Policlinico Gemelli hos- pital in Rome (where another hospital dedicated to helping people infected with Corona- virus was set up nearby); l the spiritual exercises of Lent preached by theologian, Fr Armando Matteo; l a catechism for children, entitled ‘Dear Jesus. Together with the children,’ Monday to Saturday at 12:20 and 5:30pm; l the Rosary live from Lourdes at 6pm; Mass at 7pm from the Shrine of Divine Love in Rome, a popular prayer destination for thousands of faithful every year; l the Rosary at 8pm to Mary Untier of Knots, a prayer dear to Pope Francis who as cardinal of Buenos Aires pro- moted the devotion outside Argentina. Tv2000 Director “Vincenzo Morgante said he was delight- ed by “the decision to turn on the cameras with the live broadcast of the Mass from Santa Marta.” “And the ratings,” he re- flected, “have proven us right. ... there was a need to hear a trustful voice, the voice of the Pope, the Vicar of Christ.” - www.zenit.org Dorothy Day in the war years could feel sickened by the state of American Ca- tholicism – namely, priests and their pa- rishioners who purported to love Christ but lived their faith in a perfunctory way, happy consumers and dutiful patriots, always asking too little of themselves.” Dorothy Day, Dissenting Voice Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Move- ment, is pictured in an un- dated photo. PHOTO: CNS PHOTO/ COURTESY MILWAUKEE JOURNAL The Live page of the Tv2000 website which can be found at www.tv2000.it/live/.