{"id":6202,"date":"2005-06-25T23:51:35","date_gmt":"2005-06-25T23:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/repeat-after-me-hope-is-a-virtue.html"},"modified":"2005-06-25T23:51:35","modified_gmt":"2005-06-25T23:51:35","slug":"repeat-after-me-hope-is-a-virtue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/repeat-after-me-hope-is-a-virtue.html","title":{"rendered":"Repeat after me: Hope is a virtue"},"content":{"rendered":"

My husband handed me this book by then-Cardinal Ratzinger today. <\/a>He had a chapter marked for me to read – on the problems in catechesis. I’d be interested in it, he said.<\/p>\n

So I took it with me up to the local college where Katie now has her piano lessons, and I sat on the nearly-empty campus in the 95 degree heat and read that chapter, and a few others. And I felt…depressed.<\/p>\n

I told him later that I find that reading Ratzinger drives me into wild mood swings. He makes me very happy, but the whole experience is, in general, depressing. <\/p>\n

Why? Because when I read him, and then observe the Church (in the US, at least), and what’s going on, I see this incredible chasm. It is really like two different languages are being spoken. He begins a chapter on liturgy by talking about visiting some monastery somewhere that was built in the 12th century. He describes the art, as still reflective of the best of what we now define as Eastern and Western Christianity, then uses that to explain what the Mass is and what we’re about as Church when we gather, and what is happening there, what we’re entering into,…<\/p>\n

And I know that over here, 90% of the people involved in directing our liturgical prayer have no use for this because it comes from Ratzinger and they’ve decided that he must be all about "putting the Church back before Vatican II" (a stance, incidentally, he explictly condemns), and they won’t even listen<\/em> and will just go on about their business as usual, tethering us even more tightly to the here and now and Jesus as The Best Darn Teacher Who Ever Lived, nothing cosmic about it, thank you very much.<\/p>\n

Well, at least Katie likes her new piano teacher. That’s a good thing. Possibly even in a cosmic kind of way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My husband handed me this book by then-Cardinal Ratzinger today. He had a chapter marked for me to read – on the problems in catechesis. I’d be interested in it, he said. So I took it with me up to the local college where Katie now has her piano lessons, and I sat on the…<\/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-6202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nRepeat after me: Hope is a virtue - 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\/2005\/06\/repeat-after-me-hope-is-a-virtue.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Repeat after me: Hope is a virtue - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My husband handed me this book by then-Cardinal Ratzinger today. 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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\/6202","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=6202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}