The Blood of the Chalice: in the Era of Secularism

No era, short of the Reformation, has seen more changes in the Catholic church or in the Catholic priesthood than in the last fifty years. At least three times, it appears as if we have experienced a paradigm shift in the church, first, from the immigrant church in the 1940's and 50's; then, from Vatican I; and now, as things have once more shifted to a Catholicism in an age of total secularization.These thought experiments have been culled from those fifty years within the parish priesthood, fifty years of an interactive triangle of prayer, reading, and preaching, joined to fifty years of struggling to understand what has happened in these times.Their purpose is to examine the antidote for this secular era, namely, the Mass and Eucharist and how it can respond to that era.These essays or thought experiments are written to provide a spirituality for the 21st Century. They are offered not as a theology, even if there is theology within it, but as a thought processe to address living as Catholic in these strange, secular times.…