A Paradigmatic Sunday Sermon is the sermon included within The Moist Heart, a liturgical book used for the celebration of Mass (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 120). The sermon bounces around various subjects with metaphors comparing good Catholic life to spacecraft taking off from the “launch pad of life”, to theatrics with God, “the eternal stage-door-Johnny”, and to combat with the firing the big guns of Spirituality: “Prayer, Sacrifice, and Good Counsel”.
Inspiration[]
Bowen feels the last paragraph of the sermon - the one with the "military metaphors" - may have a bit of Notre Dame satire at its heart:
"it was the fond belief of the priests who looked after our spiritual welfare that they could appeal to our boyish nature by athletic and military metaphors, thus showing us that religion was not a thing for sissies. I don't mean that the metaphors were extended to the ridiculous lengths seen in Saint Fidgeta (e.g. "launching pad of life", "asteroid belt of temptation", etc.), but they were annoying all the same. For example, we were frequently encouraged to receive the sacraments of penance (i.e., confession) and communion, and the language was invariably the same – ‘hitting the box’ and ‘hitting the rail.’ The confessional was the box and there used to be a rail (called the altar rail) separating the sanctuary from the part of the church where the congregation sat; you would kneel at this to receive communion. I think the object was to make it sound like we were participating in football or possibly military combat – obviously manly stuff, red-blooded, hairy-chested, and all that. I never encountered that before I went to Notre Dame, even in a Catholic high school run by brothers who had all been educated there, as their order was an affiliate of the priests' order that ran Notre Dame.[1]”
Myers agrees "wholeheartedly" with the comments about being exhorted to ‘hit the box’ and ‘hit the rail.’
"These would be promulgated in the Religious Bulletins slipped under all the doors in the residence halls several times a week. Notre Dame during our era was in the process of morphing into a pretty fine university, but as I may have mentioned before, the sophistication of religious instruction lagged way behind the rest of the school.[2]”
References[]
- ↑ Correspondence with Charles Bowen.
- ↑ Correspondence with Alfred Myers.
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