+ PAPIST + FILIOQUIST + AZYMITE +: Notre Dame Student Coalition Announces Demonstration

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Notre Dame Student Coalition Announces Demonstration

Notre Dame Student Response

Notre Dame Response was formed as an ad hoc, coalition consisting of various student groups at the University.

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA – The University of Notre Dame’s student-formed coalition, Notre Dame Response, has announced plans for its first official demonstration on campus: a 2:00 PM prayer rally on Sunday, April 5, 2009 to be held in front of the University’s Main Building following the noon Palm Sunday Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

The coalition was formed in response to the University’s announcement, earlier this month, of its selection of President Barack Obama as its 2009 Commencement speaker. The University also plans to award the President an honorary doctor of laws degree during the Commencement exercises.

The main speaker at the rally will be nationally recognized attorney, Harold Cassidy, who has litigated pro-life cases that have advanced the true rights and interests of pregnant mothers. He will address the human rights violations of abortion, and how abortion violates the rights, interests and health of women.

Central to that discussion will be remarks concerning the role of Catholic institutions in the abortion debate, and the role and influence in advancing the human rights violation of abortion in the speech Governor Mario Cuomo delivered at Notre Dame in 1984.

Notre Dame Response hopes that through this prayerful and public demonstration on Palm Sunday, the University community will be respectfully reminded to celebrate its Catholic character and to defend those non-negotiable principles for which Notre Dame stands, including an overarching recognition of the inherent dignity and value of all human life.

This event is also a response to University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., who last week expressed the hope that the invitation of President Obama will present an authentic “basis for an engagement with him” on those key issues that “we care so much about.”

Notre Dame Response was formed as an ad hoc, coalition consisting of various student groups at the University. Its initial statement describes the group as being committed to “acts of witness that will be characterized by respect, prayerfulness, outspoken fidelity to the Church, and true concern for the good of our University.”

Pope Urges Pastors
to Learn and Teach Liturgy

Pope Benedict XVI is encouraging pastors to catechize parishioners about the depth of the liturgy and the meaning of the sacraments as encounters with God.
The Pope affirmed this in a meeting Feb. 26 with parish priests of the Diocese of Rome, a Lenten tradition, in which he answered their questions and concerns.
He noted, "What is really important for me is that the sacraments [...] not be something foreign along with more contemporary endeavors." He added, "It can easily happen that the sacrament remains somewhat isolated in a more pragmatic context and becomes a reality that is not altogether inserted in the totality of our being."
The Pontiff stressed the need for catechesis in the parishes. He affirmed that it is important that God "not be distant but reconcilable, concrete, that he enter our lives and really be a friend with whom we can talk and who talks with us."
He continued, "We must learn to celebrate the Eucharist, learn to know Jesus Christ, the God with a human face, up close, really enter into contact with him, learn to listen to him and to allow him to enter into us."
Sacramental communion, explained the Holy Father, is not just taking a piece of bread, but rather is opening "my heart so that the Risen One will enter the context of my being, so that he is within me and not just outside of me, and thus speaks with me and transforms my being."
"He gives me the sense of justice, the dynamism of justice, in zeal for the Gospel," noted Benedict XVI.
He affirmed, "This celebration, in which God not only comes close to us, but enters into the fabric of our existence, is essential to really be able to live with God and for God and to take the light of God to this world."
Body of Christ
The Pope stated that this understanding also "leads me to the other because the other receives the same Christ, as I do."
He continued: "Hence, if the same Christ is in him and me, we also are no longer separate individual beings. Herein lies the birth of the doctrine of the Body of Christ, because we have all been incorporated if we receive the Eucharist correctly in the same Christ.
"Hence, my neighbor is truly close: we are no longer two separate 'I's, but we are united in the same 'I' of Christ."
The Pontiff told the pastors that "Eucharistic and sacramental catechesis must really go to the depth of our existence, to be, in fact, education to open myself to the voice of God, to let myself be opened to break this original sin of egoism and to open my existence profoundly, so that I will really be just."
He noted, "We must all learn the liturgy better, not as something exotic but as the heart of our being Christian, which does not open easily to a distant man, but which is, on the other hand, precisely openness to the other, to the world."
The Holy Father emphasized: "We must all collaborate in celebrating the Eucharist ever more profoundly: not only as a rite but as an existential process that touches me profoundly, more than anything else, and changes me, transforms me and, by transforming me, sparks the transformation of the world that the Lord desires and of which He wishes to make me an instrument."

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Notre Dame Student Coalition Announces Demonstration

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