The Newman Foundation

I’ve heard of some orthodox Newman centers but I’ve heard a whole lot more unorthodox one.

We should anathemized this people.

Indeed, there are orthodox Newman Centers – I’ve been going to one in Pittsburgh for about five years now. They brought me into the Church in 2000.

Unfortunately, I can’t say anywhere near the same for the Erie Benedictines. One of them serves as campus minister at my old high school. It is a sad state of affairs with the Erie Benedictines.

One can only hope that those orders out that are orthodox will continue to flourish with vocations.

Catholicism in Erie may not be quite as crazy as the Benedictines, but from the experience of my home parish, it’s certainly no where near as good as it could be. Of course, this is probably true in most dioceses around the country, unfortunately.

I should probably also say that, God love him, Father Bacik is not the most scintillating (or audible, sometimes) homilist or speaker that God ever made. Which is why it really really surprises me that he’s out doing public speaking!

The shame of it all is, the whole Catholic Studies program (or “Catholic Thought”, now) should have been wondrous. There was only one class offered during its first year, which was my final year at UT, but that was a course on basic topics in theology, each to be covered by a different famous guest speaker theologian. (Fr. Bacik apparently knew a lot of theologians.) The reason I didn’t get in was that the course was _packed_. People were hungry to know more, and signed up in droves.

Same thing with the new church building. Students were very enthusiastic about getting a real little church of our own, instead of meeting in lecture halls all the time. The webpage seems to have some good pictures, and so now I can say it doesn’t seem to have turned out all that great, though. What a shame. http://www.ccup.org/

Sigh. Of course the church is a circle. But I’m particularly unthrilled by the ugly tabernacle rock, and the single row of chairs in the chapel for daily Mass. (The law of students is that you never sit in the front row, so why would you have a chapel that’s all front row? And officially sitting in a circle is always trouble….) OTOH, I have to say that at a college where office space has always been at a premium for student organizations, and given the tininess of current Student Union offices…the “Justice and Peace Room” cries out to be exploited by Catholic Young Republicans. Heh.

The music group looks huge. We were small, but dedicated. (She said proudly.) That ended in my final year, though, when I had a required evening class just before practice. I ran across campus to get there, got chewed out by the new music director for being five minutes late, tried to explain through my panting, got chewed out some more, and then got fed up and quit at the top of my voice, explaining that I didn’t choose to give up graduation and my major for the sake of an extracurricular activity.

Good times, eh? Boy, there’s nothing better than a good music director, and nothing more petty-fascist than a bad one.

All in all, though, the ugly church is yet another reason not to go back to visit my alma mater. Like I needed another one…. 😉 But there’s always Jesu Parish, though that’s a good half-hour walk away and not the safest walk either. Especially when it snows.

The only real problem I had with Corpus Christi during my time there was that it didn’t do much to satisfy my longing for a better prayer life. I felt very exposed, praying all alone in the little chapel we had then; I’d usually go hide up in the loft when I went there. But ultimately I ended up doing a lot more prayer outside or in my room. I wanted to join some kind of prayer group or Bible study, but our Newman group was very concentrated on peace and justice and full of cheerleader types, who also made me feel nervous. I didn’t really feel like the priests really were interested in mystic prayer — well, not Fr. Zak, anyway, and good luck having a shy person like me actually get to the point when talking to a shy person like Fr. Bacik. 🙂

There was a prayer group in my dorm, but it was all Campus Crusade for Christ and stuff. The whole thing made me feel very bad and twisted inside, because I kept having to “witness” or argue theology when I was just longing to get closer to God. I did read a lot of Catholic books from the library, and that helped somewhat, but not enough.

I should never have opened my big mouth to my friends at all about my prayer experiences. I honestly thought everybody had some kind of experience of God’s presence, though. But they hadn’t, and felt bad about it, which made me feel bad. It’s not like I’m anything special. But after that, I pretty much stopped feeling that, except on rare occasions. I started feeling ashamed to pray, especially the Rosary, and I became more and more ashamed of my own thoughts and emotions about God.

So I’ve never felt as close to God again as I did before I went to college and got all twisted up. It’s sorta like singing; singing well is very easy, as long as you have the right kind of thought and feeling about what you are doing. Getting the wrong ideas can screw you up big time. Somewhere in college, I picked up some seriously unhelpful thoughts about prayer and my relationship with God, and I still haven’t gotten over it. (Though my current parish, and getting more involved in it, has helped a lot.)

Sorry I’ve rambled so much. I didn’t mean to say all this, but maybe I needed to.

Maureen