firesetter news: August 2011

17 August 2011

Prayer of Reparation for the Sin of Sacrilege and Blasphemy

Manila Archbishop Cardinal Rosales prescribes this prayer as a Catholic and Christian response to the sins of sacrilege and blasphemy that was the recent public exhibition at CCP of repulsive and obscene anti-Christian thrash/art. The prayer is to be prayed in all Masses in the Archdiocese of Manila on August 21 to 28, 2011. Also the Cardinal declares August 26 as Day of Penance and decrees that the Mass for the Forgiveness of Sins be used, with the presider in purple vestments.

Prayer of Reparation for the Sin of Sacrilege and Blasphemy

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God,
out of love for us, your sinful creatures,
you became man and sacrificed your life on the cross.

“Good theology stimulates and inflames the intellect. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan add that it also helps to move the will. The heart needs to have some intellectual vision. Good ideas play no small part in any healthy change. Thus, the Christian community is always in need of good academics. As history shows, every time the Church has compromised on its intellectual tradition, seeing it as unimportant, it has paid a heavy price. Good, sound, abstract, academic theology is perennially the great corrective within church life and spirituality.

More recently, we have been blessed with an abundance of good theology... We are not lacking for solid ideas. What we are lacking however, is fire, romance, aesthetics, as these pertain to our faith and ecclesial lives. What needs to be inflamed today inside religion is its romantic imagination. Solid ideas and solid programs alone are not enough. We need someone to re-inflame the romantic imagination of Christianity, a new Francis, a new Clare, a new Augustine, a new Thomas More, a new Ignatius, a new Therese of Lisieux.”

Ronald Rolheiser, "Secularity and the Gospel"