Last week over 500 Priests, Youth Ministers, Core Team members, and Musicians traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona for the Catholic Youth Ministry Training Convention. It was truly a blessed time to pray, worship, and laugh together as we celebrated this year’s theme of Radiant Joy. One of the most meaningful things for me was to see and hear God’s people from all over the world come together and unite in our common prayer together as we celebrated our highest form of prayer, the Mass. One
Rejoice! We’re getting so close to the greatest celebrations of our Church: Holy Week and Easter! For me, and many others that work in the Church, this is definitely the busiest time of the year. From practicing with music groups to putting scripts together, right down to making sure the cleaning people will be straightening and cleaning the Church in between the Holy Day Masses. There is so much to do. Some of you reading this might just be responsible for the Sunrise Teen Mass at your parish
Over the past few years at our Life Teen events, we’ve tried to incorporate a greater variety of Mass parts for you to sing at your youth liturgies. This arrangement of the Sanctus or Holy is a great blend of the common plain chant form mixed with a modern instrumental arrangement. The arrangement was written by Chris Muglia. We hope you enjoy it! Download an MP3 of the Sanctus Download a Lead Sheet of the Sanctus
In just over a week we enter into the sacred season of Lent. Forty days of fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and a call in this “Year of Faith” proclaimed by the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, to strengthen our faith and to help strengthen the faith of others. So what will change? In our own lives, will we just give up the same thing we gave up last year again or will we really take the time to reflect upon those things that lead us away from Christ? Will we truly seek to put those things aside and
One of the keys to inviting people to sing is simply that – to invite. Don’t scold the congregation and don’t show your frustration and start saying how you come here week after week to lead them in song and no one sings! This is the wrong approach! Simply invite and affirm them. Remind them that our role at the Liturgy is to practice full, active, conscious, participation as Vatican II tells us. Tell them that it sounds so beautiful to hear their voices singing God’s praise together.
Well there is a countdown going on today and it has nothing to do with 80’s rock bands, but everything to do with the third edition of the Roman Missal. We are only 19 days away from this new translation of the current Sacramentary we use at Mass. So here’s the question … are you ready?! I hope the answer is: “Yes!” If you are worried that you may have forgotten something, let’s start with the obvious.
Fr. Richard Hilgartner, Executive Director of the Secretariat of Divine Worship, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), shares some of the changes behind the new translation of the Roman Missal. He particularly talks about the challenges and opportunities about sharing these changes in the context of youth ministry. Video is taken from the 2010 Life Teen Liturgy and Music Conference.
Why are the words of the Catholic Mass changing? Fr. John Muir confronts the misconceptions about the changes with truth and clarity. Fr. John helps parents understand the recent history behind the newest 3rd Edition of the Roman Missal and how it grows from the 1st and 2nd editions. Fr. John compares the “dynamic equivalent” and the “formal equivalent” of how we translate words from Latin to English, and then explains the elaborate process used to create the new Roman Missal. Finally,