Also In This Issue...
Preparations in diocese begin for new missal translation
With the Vatican’s approval of the new translation of the Roman missal and the implementation date set for the First Sunday of Advent 2011 comes an invitation, according to the director of the diocesan Office of Divine Worship.
“This is not just a matter of opening the book and reading different words,” said Msgr. Stanley Deptula. “If that’s all it were, I guess it would be simple.
“But this is an invitation to go deeper in our appreciation for the sacred liturgy and our love of the sacraments that are celebrated in the liturgy, to go deeper in our love for the church,” he told The Catholic Post. He quoted Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, CSC, who says, “We do not form the liturgy, the liturgy forms us.”
Christian, Muslim women to dialogue in Quad Cities
MOLINE -- At a time when there is national debate over whether or not a Muslim community center should be built near ground zero in New York, Christian and Muslim women in the Quad Cities will come together to dialogue about their religious and family customs.
Sponsored by the Benedictine Sisters of St. Mary Monastery in Rock Island and Quad City Muslim Women, the fifth annual dialogue will take place at the Islamic Center of the Quad Cities, 6005 34th Ave., on Mondays, Sept. 20 and 27. Each 90-minute session begins at 7 p.m.
The theme for this year’s gatherings is “Sharing Our Global Cultures in the Quad City Community: Our Faith Perspective.”
Group from Moline parish back from El Salvador ‘immersion’
By Jennifer Willems
MOLINE -- Walking down “memory lane” can bring great joy. It can also bring great sadness. Sister Charlotte Seubert, FSPA, pastoral associate at Christ the King Parish found both when she returned to El Salvador in August as part of a group from the Moline parish.
They traveled to El Salvador as part of an immersion program known as GATE (Global Awareness Through Experience), a sponsored ministry of her religious community, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. GATE strives to give participants a sense of the cultural, political, economic and religious aspects of Salvadoran life.
“We went to the hospital chapel where Romero was killed, to the place where the Jesuits were killed,” she told The Catholic Post after taking a deep breath. “I had been there through the whole thing. It was like I was reliving the whole thing.”
Diocese receives relic on Mother Teresa's birth centenary
As Catholics around the world celebrated the 100th birthday of Blessed Mother Teresa on Aug. 26 (see stories, next page), the Diocese of Peoria received a priceless gift from the religious community the late nun founded.
The Missionaries of Charity have given the diocese a first-class relic of their foundress -- a lock of Mother Teresa’s hair preserved in a reliquary. It will be displayed at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, which Mother Teresa visited in 1997.
“It’s good to have Mother Teresa back in the cathedral,” said Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, CSC, in accepting the relic from Msgr. Paul Showalter, vicar general.
Parish respect life reps pray, study, are commissioned
By Jennifer Willems
God gifts each person to do what he asks, but there’s a catch.
“With every gift comes a responsibility to use what we have received for the glory of God and the service of our neighbor,” Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, CSC, told the parish respect life coordinators from around the Diocese of Peoria who gathered for Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria last Saturday.
That becomes urgent when those neighbors are “God’s little ones, the most defenseless and most especially the unborn,” he said. “We cannot ever grow tired. We cannot become discouraged. We can never become fearful.”
Senior priests told lasting importance of relationships
HENRY -- God created human beings to live in an “obligatory matrix” of time, space, things and relationships, and at death we leave three of them behind, said a Franciscan priest and scientist who recently addressed the senior priests of the Diocese of Peoria at their annual gathering at Nazareth House.
“When we pass through death’s door, we leave behind all time, space and things, carrying only relationships with us into the afterlife,” according to Father John Ostdiek of Holy Cross Friary in Quincy. “That’s why we must pay attention to our relationship with God, our relationships to other people, and our relationship to the world around us.”
He has five words for those who think that they need to go off from the world to strengthen their relationship with God: “It ain’t going to happen.”