Mass at the Vatican

Merry Christmas to all from the Monks of St. Vincent Archabbey!!!

Christmas Homily

From: saintvincentarchabbey.org

Is 52:7-10; Ps 98:1-6; Heb 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18

"All you lands break into song--sing praise!"

Sing! Break into song! Sing praise! No less than six times does the Psalmist summon us and all the nations, and all the ends of the earth, to sing joyfully to the LORD. We have every reason to sing and shout for the LORD has revealed his justice and made his salvation known in the sight of the nations. We cannot hold back the songs. Even during the years of war against Christmas, even in our so-called secular society, we cannot hold back the Christmas Songs. Advertising, political candidates, people on the streets are spreading the season's greetings. Christmas Carols abound all around us; they are on the lips of believers and non-believers alike. Is it any wonder that the Aggressive Secularists are so adamant about little things like "happy holidays" and no public nativity scenes and no "Christmas trees, or Christmas anything for that matter? These little things bother them because they are so powerful that they survive even after people have let their faith diminish and even disappear. The songs and the celebrations of Christmas keep alive the memory, sometimes unconscious, of the birth of Christ the Lord. Though some may be unconscious about all the singing and celebrating, the LORD remembers his faithfulness and love for the House of Israel. This is our reason for the season that God Remembers. Yes, the LORD has remembered his promise to save us and in the sight of all the nations he has bared his holy arm and to the ends of the earth he has shown forth his power to save. All through history the LORD has reminded his people of his faithfulness through the Prophets and in these last days he has made that faithfulness incarnate in his Eternal Word, his Eternal Son becoming flesh and making his dwelling among us. Can there be any better reason to sing and shout for joy?

At the very beginning of Advent the Prophet Isaiah offers us a word of comfort, "Give comfort to my people, says the Lord!" Again today we hear the same message from Isaiah, "For the LORD comforts his people, he redeems Jerusalem." This is a timeless message from on high. We still need the comfort only the Lord can give. We still need to hear glad tidings, announcements of peace, good news of salvation. We still need to hear what our faith filled ancestors needed to hear. We need to hear, "Your God is King!" Only when God is the sovereign ruler of every human heart, and of every nation on earth, only then will we live together in peace. When anyone else is king or anything else is sovereign we are lawless; our desires and plans become more important than everything else. We are slaves to what we want and when we want it. Nothing and no one can hold up any boundaries for our plans or desires. Out of such chaos we cannot come by our own power. We are powerless to redeem ourselves. We need to catch a glimpse of the Lord's bare arm restoring our human dignity and his peaceful kingdom in our midst. No wonder the sentinels are the prophets, and no wonder they have beautiful feet for they have had a glimpse of the future that Christmas allows us to see. Indeed, our future glory has begun in the birth of Emmanuel. The LORD our God is restoring, redeeming, and renewing his people so that the whole world will know His saving power.

It seems that early on in the history of our church that the angels became too important. In an effort to help the faithful grow in confidence about the presence and power of the LORD to save us, the concept of the angels began to compete with the Son of God. This issue is dealt with in the important teaching of the Letter to the Hebrews. The Jewish people had heard the voice of the Lord through his holy prophets and in the New Covenant they experienced the gift of prophecy and the ministry of the angelic messengers. However, it is the definitive word spoken through His Son, Jesus Christ, that is our source of purification from sin. He, the Eternal Son, is the one through whom God created the universe; He is the refulgence of his glory; He is the imprint of his being; He sustains all things by his mighty word. The unity of being between the Father and the Son is the source of our Christmas Joy. The unity of will between the Father and the Son is the source of our Salvation. This newborn King of Glory sits at the right hand of the Majesty; He is far superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than all the angels put together. The Letter to the Hebrews uses a familiar Psalm to complete the argument: No angel has ever been called, "my son" by Abba. Never has Abba revealed that he is father to any angel. Finally, when Abba leads his eternally begotten son into the world He commands all the angels to worship him, the King of Angels. It is their song that sparks all our Christmas Songs, and it is their singing and the many songs of faith from the earliest days that makes available the teaching of the church about the mystery of the Eternal Son who became the Son of Mary.

The Evangelist, Saint John, speaks of himself and the apostolic community when he writes, "And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth." In history and among those Saint John knew and loved he saw the glory of the Only Son, Jesus Christ. Because this Son is full of grace and truth, we who have heard the testimony of the Apostles have become full of grace and truth. We have been granted the sheer grace of mercy, the forgiveness of our sins. We have come to know the One True God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we know him as he is because he has revealed himself as he is. We who believe in his name; we were born not by natural generation nor by man’s choice and decision, but by the power and purpose of God. As the liturgy's reflection upon the mystery of Christmas has matured to the Forth Gospel, we have moved from historical details pointing to the great mysteries to the great mysteries encompassing historical details. In what has been called the Prologue of Saint John we see him repeating this idea, "In the beginning was the Word,?and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This is the full flowering of the Synoptic tradition and the core teaching of the Apostles. The Word that leapt from the womb of the Father in the blazing fire of the Holy Spirit who overshadowed the Virgin, is Jesus The Christ, the newborn King of Israel and the eternal King of Angels. He is the one we worship in his humanity and in his divinity. He is truly worthy of our worship, and in him, we live an move and have our being, now and unto the ages of ages. In the full light of Christmas Day we have seen his glory and this glory has moved us from glory to glory. Indeed, we are saturated with his glorious light and our darkened world does not overcome the light we are in Christ and in the Holy Spirit.

O Antiphons

This evening our Community will begin chanting the Traditional "O Antiphons" at Vespers. The seven "O Antiphons" (also called the "Greater Antiphons" or "Major Antiphons") are prayers that come from the Breviary's Vespers during the Octave before Christmas Eve, a time which is called the "Golden Nights."

Each Antiphon begins with "O" and addresses Jesus with a unique title which comes from the prophecies of Isaias and Micheas (Micah), and whose initials, when read backwards, form an acrostic for the Latin "Ero Cras" which means "Tomorrow I come." Those titles for Christ are:

Sapientia
Adonai
Radix Jesse
Clavis David
Oriens
Rex Gentium
Emmanuel

Above is this evenings antiphon, click here for an audio clip (from Fisheaters.com)

Wimmer Mass

For those who are interested in viewing the closing Mass of the Wimmer year, here it is.  His Eminence Justin Cardinal Rigali principal celebrant and homilist. 

Production: David Safin, Andrew Campbell, Fineline Multimedia
Post-Production: David Safin

Dolores Hart: How a movie actress left Hollywood for a contract with God

The following article was written by Barbara Cloud of the  Post-Gazette (April 8, 1998)

She was so pretty. And so talented.

Her name was Dolores Hart, and her movie file is bulging with typical studio promotion pictures with actors like George Hamilton, Stephen Boyd and Jeff Chandler.

It was back in the early '60s, and she was headed for stardom when, abruptly, it ended.

Why it ended is a touching story that came to mind when I was watching "Entertainment Tonight" a few weeks ago.

They were going to interview the young woman who had given Elvis Presley his first movie kiss in "King Creole." The year was 1958.

The actress was Dolores Hart.

The question she always got in interviews during her movie career (and, afterwards, on "ET" it would seem) was "What is it like kissing Elvis?"

Was it embarrassing to be asked such a question? Was that to be her legacy?

She was amused when I asked her recently, and not the least bit shy.

"I think the limit for a screen kiss back then was something like 15 seconds. That one has lasted 40 years."

And she chuckled a bit at the memory.

There is far more to this beautiful woman than that kiss, believe me.

I wrote her after seeing her that night on "ET." My letter simply stated how good it was to see her looking so well and, obviously, expressing delight that her decision to leave the movies, a difficult one to be sure, had turned out so well. She was happy. It had been the right thing to do.

How could she give up her dream of being an actress?

Her answer was simple. "How could I not?"

She calls me a friend, but we had not been in touch for 35 years. Our connection was through my job as a reporter for The Pittsburgh Press. 

She came here twice, the first time in 1960 to promote the film "Where the Boys Are," and each time it was a pleasant meeting, and I felt very comfortable talking to her.

But on her second promotion tour to Pittsburgh in 1963 she was a different person, distracted and introspective. I noticed the change but didn't think much of it, until I read a few weeks later she had left the film industry to enter the monastic life at Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.

Four years later, in 1967, I heard from her again. She explained why she had seemed pensive and withdrawn during our last meeting, although by then I knew. I wanted to do a story about her new life, but she wasn't ready for that.

"It wasn't that I didn't like the media. I found it stimulating. And I wasn't running from it. But when you decide to do this you must give all of yourself, just as I gave all of myself when I was an actress."

The letter she wrote to me as Sister Judith, before her final vows, detailed to some extent the anguish she was experiencing at that time.

"It was really a nightmare," she wrote, "in that I was so absorbed in coming here at the time, my heart was hardly able to contain anything else. Naturally it was also the one thing I could not speak about, so my memory fails in recalling much about that era."

I more or less forgot about Dolores Hart after that, but now she was on the phone, still showing the gracious manner she had as an actress, but more than that, willing to answer all my questions, friend to friend.

There is a reason she is suddenly "out there" and it has to do with a CD called "Women in Chant," which features the choir of Benedictine nuns at Regina Laudis singing Gregorian chants. Sales benefit the work of the abbey.

Mother Dolores Hart, O.S.B., is credited with the cover photo of the night-blooming cereus (as ethereal as Georgia O'Keeffe's two jimson weeds in oil to my eyes), and she is also part of the choir, although she never considered herself a singer.

For that matter, she never saw herself as a nun.

It was not a lifelong dream," she said. "I did not grow up wanting to be a nun. I wanted to be an actress. If it had ever been suggested I would one day be a nun, it would have been the last thing on my mind. It was a million to one shot I would ever be a nun."

She was an only child, and she was not raised Catholic. An omen toward her future might have been her own request to convert to Catholicism when she was 10. Or a photo from a film she did in 1960 in which the statue of St. Francis of Assisi in Rome loomed behind her, arms outstretched.

She did not know at that time, but the lure of the religious life had begun.

"As a child I was precocious," she said. "My parents married when they were 16 and 17 and both were beautiful people. Moss Hart offered my mother, Harriett, a contract but by then they had me and my father, Bert Hicks, a bit player, definitely a Clark Gable type, had movie offers so we moved from Chicago to Hollywood. I was a Hollywood brat. We lived in Beverly Hills and I used to visit the lots with him. He had a bit part in 'Forever Amber.' I always wanted to be part of that life."

She realized a new direction in her life, she said, began while she was appearing on Broadway in 1958 in "The Pleasure of His Company" with such renowned actors as Cyril Ritchard, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Charles Ruggles, Walter Abel and a former Carnegie Tech student, George Peppard.

She had already been asked to re-create her role in the film version of the play and she was very excited about that. Then, one night Debbie Reynolds came to see the play and she was taking notes during the performance. Dolores Hart realized she was not going to be in the movie and it was a big blow to her.

But other things were also happening.

"A friend suggested visiting this very tranquil place in Connecticut one weekend and it was Regina Laudis Abbey," she said. "After that, whenever I was on the East Coast, I would go there. I began to notice each time I went it was becoming harder and harder to leave. I had this feeling. I was home."

A few years passed and she continued doing movies until one titled "Lisa," which dealt with the Holocaust and experiments done on prisoners at Auschwitz, sparked something inside her.

"It affected me so deeply and more and more I found myself drawn to the abbey, almost like magnetism."

When she entered the abbey Sister Judith was selected as her name because she was, after all, starting a new life. A new name seemed appropriate, but when she made her final vows she changed it to Sister Dolores. It was also a wish from her mother, to keep the name Dolores.

"Hal Wallis wanted to call me Susan when I started my movie career," she recalled, "but I was under age and my mother would not hear of it. She wanted me to be Dolores."

Mother Dolores calls her life as a Benedictine nun "an island of enclosure." It is a monastic life that includes prayers at several hours of the day, including 2 a.m. It is a structured life with little time for much else than handling chores on the farm and woodlands involving 359 acres. The land maintains the community, the group of 40 women of various professional backgrounds.

Friends send movies to the abbey and she watches more than many of the other nuns because of her background, but there usually isn't time to see many. She watched "Titanic" and she had hoped Dame Judi Dench would win the Oscar for "Mrs. Brown."

Would Hollywood ever see her return?

The odds, she says, are a million to one.

But those were the same odds she would ever become a nun.