Views from the Choir Loft

Lecture: What Happens to Us in Liturgy?

Fr. David Friel · September 24, 2020

LTHOUGH its annual, weekend conference has been curtailed this year due to COVID-19, the Society for Catholic Liturgy (SCL) is offering a series of virtual lectures in its place. The first conference is scheduled for this Saturday.

Dr. David Fagerberg, professor of liturgical studies at the University of Notre Dame, will present a lecture entitled What Happens to Us in Liturgy? beginning at 3 PM (EDT) on Saturday, September 26, 2020. His presentation will include a period of questions & answers and will conclude at 4:15 PM (EDT).

The conference will be conducted via Zoom and is open to all. Those interested in attending the Zoom conference should register through the SCL website.

Fagerberg is the author of several excellent books, including Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology?, On Liturgical Asceticism, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology, and Liturgy outside Liturgy: The Liturgical Theology of Fr. Alexander Schmemann.

The remainder of the 2020-2021 SCL virtual lecture series has not yet been announced. Stay tuned for further information as it becomes available!

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

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About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel served as Parochial Vicar at St. Anselm Parish in Northeast Philly. He is currently a doctoral candidate in liturgical theology at The Catholic University of America.—(Read full biography).

PDF Download • Vespers for the Dead

Mr. Albert Bloomfield kindly sent me “Vespers for the Dead”—which does not fulfill a priest’s obligation to pray the Divine Office, yet is often prayed when a loved one dies. Here is formatting A, and here it is again with formatting B.

—Jeff Ostrowski

20 October 2020 • “What we can’t share”

Almighty God has given to us the example of the Jesuit Martyrs of North America, whose feast day we celebrated yesterday. Of course, along with those eight martyrs we honor their associates, e.g Father François Bressani. I can’t share with you the torments Father Bressani underwent at the hands of Iroquois: it is too brutal. It would tear your heart out. But I will share what Bressani’s Superior said, after receiving a letter from him: “The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer has only one finger left on his right hand, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds—which are still open—from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his table is the earth.” If you have the stomach for it, read what Father Bressani (d. 1672) underwent for Jesus Christ. Let his example help us never fall into sins of impurity, avarice, ingratitude, or envy.

—Jeff Ostrowski

13 October 2020 • Chopin talks Bach

My “pianist pedigree” goes from my teacher through Wiktor Łabuński through Felix Blumenfeld, who studied with Anton Rubinstein. I always considered myself part of the “Bach-Mozart-Chopin school” as opposed to the “Handel-Beethoven-Liszt school.” (Needless to say, there’s great overlap between these schools.) Before giving a concert, Frédéric Chopin would always shut himself up in a room and play through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The year Chopin died, he spent considerable time with the painter, Eugène Delacroix (d. 1863), who recounts hearing Chopin launch into a monologue on the transcendence of J.S. Bach, insisting that “the fugue is like pure logic in music,” and that “to know fugue deeply is to be acquainted with the element of all reason and all consistency in music.”

—Jeff Ostrowski