C’est mon fête aujourd’hui!

Happy Feast (comm) of SS Perpetua and Felicitas!

I'm working on a few things about the place at the moment. The general World Youth Day initiative has really started to pick up over the last few weeks, with interest becoming more zealous. From my observations around the diocese, the Lord is preparing a great field for us to go to work in, and work we shall.

I'm reading 'Winning Converts in Australia' - papers from a 1952 Melbourne conference. I love reading the papers. It's like we are still speaking face to face. I'm also reading 'The Creed in Slow Motion,' by Monsignor Ronald Knox, and though only a few pages in, I've found the following to share with you on this day:

I BELIEVE IN GOD:

"Well, we are starting this afternoon with "I believe in God"; that ought to last us for the length of a whole sermon, even if we cut it down as much as we can. Let me direct your attention first of all to the use of the word "I". Surely that's curious, if you come to think of it? Surely saying the Credo ought to be a tremendous congregational act, uniting us in a common profession of faith, and surely at that rate it ought to start "WE believe"? But it doesn't, you see, ever take that form.

Go out to Lourdes, and watch from the top of the slope tens of thousands of candles flickering there below, in the torch-light procession. So many of them, they don't look like separate candles; it is just a vast haze of light. And the people who carry them are singing Credo; Credo, not Credimus. And so it is at Mass.

If you watch the Gloria, it is we all through, Laudamus te, Benedicimus te, Adoramus te, Glorificamus te, and so on; we loose ourselves in a crowd when we are singing the Gloria. But when we sing the Credo, we are not meant to loose ourselves in a crowd. Every clause of it is the expression of my opinion, for which I am personally responsible. Just so with the Confiteor; it is always Confiteor we say, not Confitemur, even when we are saying it together. Why? Because my sins are my sins, and your sins are your sins; each of us is individually responsible.

So it is with the Credo; each of us, in lonely isolation, makes himself or herself responsible for that tremendous statement, "I believe in God"."

My Champion, and my God.