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Author: Bruce Morrill

  • Wanted: Resources for Chanting the Psalter

    This is a call out to Pray Tell participants for suggested resources for chanting the psalms daily. … My friend’s inquiry has left me “as lost as a Jesuit in Holy Week.”

  • Review of June Programs Related to Liturgy

    A report on two conventions and one summer degree program of potential interest to Pray Tell readers: the annual meetings of the College Theology Society and Catholic Theological Society of America, plus the summer degree programs in liturgy and preaching offered by the School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.

  • An Autobiographical Review of J.B. Metz’s Influence on Liturgical Theology

    For me, J. B. Metz’s Faith in History and Society provided the key conceptualization for why the Christian religion struggles in late-modern North Atlantic societies, as well as how in this context to think afresh the relationship between liturgy and ethics, “mysticism and politics.”

  • Good Table Manners?

    “The fact that by the end of Vatican II the church’s dogmatic teaching treated the Mass in terms not of propitiatory sacrifice but of table—the one table of Christ, both Word and Body—cannot be overestimated in relation to the reform of the Mass that followed. The popular, practical import over the ensuing half-century in the…

  • Kinda Incensed Over Incense

    I felt reduced to a mere spectator, watching the priest dignify the objects of bread and wine and candle–symbols of the risen crucified one, indeed–but seemingly blind to the dignity of the baptized assembled for the great offering of praise and thanksgiving.

  • Blessing Non-Communicants during Holy Communion

    I am seeking information on the now widespread custom in U.S. Catholic parishes whereby people (adults and children) unable to receive the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood request and receive, instead, a blessing from the minister of holy communion.

  • Seeking “Sacred” Silence

    The “opening prayer” is a silent prayer done by “all in silence with the priest” (per the Roman Missal), with the priest truly functioning as a presider by leading all in the silent prayer and concluding it with the Collect.

  • Ars Praedicandi: Homily for a Ritual Mass for the Anointing of the Sick

    The pastoral team at a local Nashville parish has asked me to give a series of adult education sessions this fall on healing and the Pastoral Care of the Sick, including suggested reading for the more engaged participants.

  • Dateline: April 4th, Holy Saturday, Scammon Bay, Alaska

    In any event, in this post I hope some readers might find a glimpse into the church at one edge of the North American continent, as well as into the heart or soul of a veteran pastoral minister struggling with the Missal text in service to the church’s liturgical tradition.