Priest! Priest! Music! Music!

We drove about, looking for churches, my father and I. My father, as you probably know, was a clergyman — he knew all the Uppland churches like the back of his hand. We went to morning services in variouis places and were deeply impressed by the spiritual poverty of these churches, by the lack of any congregation and the miserable spiritual status of the clergy, the poverty of their sermons, and the nonchalance and indifference of the ritual. In one church, I remember — and I think it has a great deal to do with the end of the film — Father and I were sitting together. My father had already been retired for many years, and was old and frail.... Just before the bell begins to toll, we hear a car outside, a shining Volvo: the clergyman climbs out hurriedly, and there is a faint buzz from the vestry, and then the clergyman appears before he ought to — when the bell stops, that is — and says he feels very poorly and that he's talked to the rector and the rector has said he can use an abbrviated form of the service and drop the part at the altar. So there would be just one psalm and a sermon and another psalm. And goes out. Whereon my father, furious, began hammering on the pew, got to his feet and marched out into the vestry, where a long mumbled conversation ensued; after which the churchwarden also went in, then someone ran up the organ gallery to fetch the organist, after which the churchwarden came out and announced that there would be a complete service after all. My father took the service at the altar, but at the beginning and the end. In some way I feel the end of the play was influenced by my father's intervention — that at all costs one must do what it is one's duty to do, particularly in spiritual contexts. Even if it can seem meaningless.

He had to learn to sing, readily and accurately, all the tunes that were used in the many distinct Soma-sacrifices, and he had also to know which strophes were required for each sacrifice and in what order they were sung. Therefore, that the young priest might master all the tunes thoroughly and have any one at command at any moment, each was connected with a single stanza of the right metre, and the teacher made his pupils sing it over and over again, until tune and stanza were firmly imprinted, in indissoluble association, in the memory.

In the confessor I asked for a friend, the soul that loved my soul, that shared I would almost say the nature of my feelings, that participated in my vocation. I was asking conformity to feel ; this seemed to me to be an essential sharing so that he could direct the actions of my spirit, he shouldn't have taken me outside my natural center. It's true, I asked to be able in a certain way to influence the soul of the confessor, to sincerely give him my impressions of my conduct. It seemed to me that our action must in some way be reciprocal. Certainly St. Francis and St. Francesca had this communion of feelings over them.

In church, sacred music would make believers of us all—but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.

Califano and I both went to the Holy Trinity Church here when our children were small, and part of the service was that, after 9:00 or 10:00 mass, the children would go down for Sunday school, and they would have a discussion there for the grownups. They’d have one of the Jesuits who would come over and lead the discussion, and they were always enormously interesting, very interesting, very gifted, talented lecturers. There were always a couple hundred people who were there with their children, and then, at whatever time, an hour later, you would break up and hook up with your children and drive them home.

The Catholic Church has a great particularity, there is no better administrator than a priest and people linked to the Church. For me it is important to maintain a cordial and respectful relationship with this Pastoral care, we are available for any situation in which we can intervene. Our common home is the Dominican Republic, therefore, we must work hard to protect and defend it together, we must think about our children, grandchildren and those who will come after them.

Paradise is, as from the learn'd I gather,
A choir of blest souls circling in the Father.

You can’t take the parish priest out of this bishop. I certainly admire those in specialized ministry, but all I wanted to be was a parish priest. I saw growing up in Oxnard these wonderful young priests, reaching out—they used to come and take us out of school, we would be spread-eagled over a U-Haul with food for the poor. That really attracted us. So many of us feel we were called to follow the example of many of those priests who really lived their ministry.

It was not smooth at all, and it was because of me, not because of Jim. Jim should have ****in' fired me several times. Jim was extraordinarily patient. I was a young guy who wanted to make his mark in the world, and if I was the co-director, by God why wasn't I attending more meetings and why didn't I get more say in things? I had a problem of self-esteem and it came through that way. It was difficult for Jim, not for me. It was frustrating for me, but that was an unhealthy frustration. It worked because Jim was patient.

The audience was transported, not only by the work but also by the fine dynamics of the choir, which were something unusual in those days. Not less powerful was the religious impression made by Bach’s music. “The crowded hall looked like a church,” writes Fanny Mendelssohn. “Every one was filled with the most solemn devotion; one heard only an occasional involuntary ejaculation that sprang from deep emotion.

Cardinal Re: I had been in the Secretariat of State for eight years. With us was a Polish priest, Monsignor Jozef Kowalczyk. Four days after he was elected, he brought me the first homily written in Polish by John Paul II and translated into Italian by Poles, asking me to review it. I read and reread that text'.

Gamache enjoyed going to churches for their music and the beauty of the language and the stillness. But he felt closer to God in his Volvo.

Look carefully around St Peter's and St Mary Major and ask the crowd: they will all answer that they are waiting for a new Francis. Without looking for a photocopy, I am convinced that we will go ahead along Bergoglio's line, I have spoken about it with many cardinals. Interviewer: the opposing factions? Cardinal Kasper: In the general congregations they seem to me to be a small group. The Church cannot afford to backtrack now.