![]() Consider: he founded the first Benedictine community in post-revolutionary France in 1836, now known as St. And now, with Dom Oury’s Dom Gueranger available in English (it was originally published in French in 2000), we have another Benedictine’s word for it.ĭom Prosper Gueranger was one of the greatest Churchmen of the 19th century and a case study in how to provide the necessary “shock” to recapture the mystery of the Christian faith. In many places in Europe, splendid cathedrals which once throbbed with life are now reduced to museums: empty shells of a past no longer understood, no longer loved-indeed, a past that is sometimes hated.”įather Folsom adds that, while modern culture still has its gods to worship, they are, if we may judge them by their fruits, death-dealing gods, which require a corrective or a “shock to the system.” That shock is found in the liturgically structured life of the Benedictine community. Since that culture has gradually and progressively separated itself from its origins in the Catholic cultus, it is no longer sustainable. “In Western civilization, a glorious culture of extraordinary beauty developed from the worship of God in the Catholic liturgy, in particular in the sacrifice of the Mass. ![]() “Culture always comes from the worship of something, the veneration of what we care most deeply about,” he says. ![]() As Father Folsom notes in a 2018 presentation at the Avila Institute (and reprinted in the May 2019 issue of Adoremus), liturgy plays an essential role in culture. Benedictine Father Cassian Folsom understands this better than most, having formed an effective Catholic counterculture with his fellow monks at the Benedictine Monastery of Nursia in Italy. But how do we begin to regenerate a culture so seemingly hopeless? The answer is right before our eyes-and present to our other senses as well-in the sacred liturgy. What are the symptoms that our patient is dying? We could point to particulars: the broad-scale acceptance of abortion declining birthrates in most Western countries the destruction of the family through permissive divorce laws and so-called “same-sex” marriage and most recently, society’s pandemic confusion over natural gender and the complementarity of the sexes.Īs Catholics, believing as we do that God continues to work in and through the world, we cannot simply throw up our hands or throw in the towel.
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