{"id":4375,"date":"2006-02-22T11:04:07","date_gmt":"2006-02-22T11:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/catholic-spirituality-today.html"},"modified":"2006-02-22T11:04:07","modified_gmt":"2006-02-22T11:04:07","slug":"catholic-spirituality-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/catholic-spirituality-today.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholic Spirituality Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

A survey by Lawrence Cunningham, in Commonweal.<\/a><\/p>\n

The piece is a decent overview, although any critical notes are reserved for certain parties, while other parties are preserved. So, the mild snide tone that permeates the Marian devotion paragraph:<\/p>\n

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If the new ecclesial movements or affiliation with existing religious communities are oriented toward established groups, one can still observe older trends. In this country, for example, there remains a thirst among some for a type of Marian devotionalism associated with purported apparition sites, whether in this country (for example, Bayside, New York) or abroad (for example, Medjugorje). Such devotionalism got a fair impetus from John Paul II\u2019s rather baroque enthusiasm for devotion to Mary, as seen, for instance, in his conviction that Our Lady of F\u00e1tima saved his life when he was struck by an assassin\u2019s bullet-a bullet the pope later enshrined in a statue depicting Our Lady of F\u00e1tima. It may also account in part for the widespread popularity of Gibson\u2019s film, The Passion of the Christ, whose script was influenced by the extravagant \u201crevelations\u201d of Anne Catherine of Emmerich, an early nineteenth-century German mystic. The rallying point for the recrudescence of these types of devotionalism is the cable channel EWTN, with its endless procession of priests swanning about in elaborate religious garb and preaching about this or that form of devotion. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

slips away in the Eastern spirituality section:<\/p>\n

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Given the therapeutic bent of our culture and the concomitant popularity of self-help literature, there have been some dubious attempts to link these approaches with the spiritual plane. The mildly faddish interest in the Enneagram or the Jungian-inspired Myers\/Briggs assessment model, for example, has attained a certain hold in some quarters of the current Catholic scene. Add to this the advertisements one reads for retreat houses offering labyrinth walks, massage therapy, specialized retreats for those who wish to combine Christian contemplative practices and Zen sitting (zazen), courses in male spirituality, hermitage experiences, and so on, and you begin to get the sense that Catholic spirituality may become too capacious an umbrella. Furthermore, the intrusion of new-age practices and other experimental approaches has raised enough concern that the Vatican\u2019s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued warnings, not always prudently formulated, against false mysticism and\/or syncretism. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That first paragraph I cited could be faulted on a number of other levels aside from tone. First, in tying in Marian devotion to either condemned (Bayside) or questioned (Medjugorje) apparitions, he immediately renders the whole thing questionable in the reader’s eyes. This account also gives a radically diminished picture of the growing appeal of "traditional" devotions. Were all those kids praying the rosary at World Youth Day Bayside devotees? Seems that WYD could merit a mention, anyway, as could, say the numerous spiritual conferences held around the country, either under diocesan auspices (the recent Eucharistic congresses in Atlanta, for example, which have been very successful<\/a>, or last fall’s huge Eucharistic Congress in Minneapolis-St. Paul)<\/a> or organized by groups like Call to Holiness. He could have rung up one of the organizations dedicated to promoting Perpetual Adoration – <\/a>they actually have fairly good stats, since parishes contact them for support and information when starting Adoration.<\/p>\n

Could have – and should have to get a more accurate and fair picture.<\/p>\n

I won’t quibble with his description of the popularity of spiritual writers like Rolheiser – he is <\/em>a best-seller and popular speaker. Taken as a whole, the piece is all right, but could have benefited from either equal-opportunity snideness or no snideness at all….<\/p>\n

Oh, and something I forgot to mention when I posted this earlier – the piece would have benefited from a discussion of the increased and increasing popularity of the Liturgy of the Hours, in some form or other, among laity and in parishes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A survey by Lawrence Cunningham, in Commonweal. The piece is a decent overview, although any critical notes are reserved for certain parties, while other parties are preserved. So, the mild snide tone that permeates the Marian devotion paragraph: If the new ecclesial movements or affiliation with existing religious communities are oriented toward established groups, one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholic Spirituality Today - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/catholic-spirituality-today.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholic Spirituality Today - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A survey by Lawrence Cunningham, in Commonweal. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}