"U2charist"
  • jonmclear
    Posts: 15
    After reading an entry from another email list, I did a quick google search and came up with this interesting thingy:

    http://www.stgeorgesyorkharbor.org/U2%20Eucharists/u2charists.html

    Has anyone experienced this in the Catholic setting? There are a lot of words and phrases that catch my eye when I read this. Yikes.

    A snippet from the above article:
    "The background in brief: my parishioners and I noticed that U2 was popping up in conversation at the church in many different settings-adult education classes, meetings, coffee hour-and we kept finding ourselves talking about how U2 had been important on our spiritual journeys. I had just read Get Up Off Your Knees, a collection of sermons based on U2 lyrics, and floated the idea of a service in which all the music, from hymns to "service music" (like the Gloria or Kyrie) would be by U2, and a number of parishioners in different generations were really excited. So we built a team to design the liturgy and choose the music, and to ask questions like, How do we get the sound loud enough? and How do we play the music? a DJ? A CD? Powerpoint? We chose powerpoint since we figured we'd want the lyrics visible and for people to be hands-free for dancing and clapping if possible. Powerpoint slides with the lyrics of the music and also the rest of the service on them, coordinated with the playing of the music, has been the best tool to allow full participation from the audience. We have also provided a paper bulletin with the same information as the powerpoint slides."
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    "U2... I had just read... and floated the idea... really excited... so we built a team to design the liturgy... Powerpoint... dancing and clapping if possible... Powerpoint"

    As if the Church had no culture of its own. As if they had to reinvent everything for the Mass, for the first time. As if they had no liturgical family, no predecessors. As if the Mass requires no transformation of the secular to the sacred.

    Where is the pastor?
  • GavinGavin
    Posts: 2,799
    I haven't heard of this being done in Catholic churches yet. I really doubt it's anything to worry about for us.
  • David AndrewDavid Andrew
    Posts: 1,204
    Is jonmclear serious?

    I think we've been had here.

    Oh, wait a minute. St. George's York Harbor is a "Whiskey-palian" church.

    'S'plains everything.
  • Daniel Bennett PageDaniel Bennett Page
    Posts: 833
    This is just another example of the myriad ways in which the 'mere Christianity' shared by Anglicanism with other ecclesial bodies has been hollowed out during the past 40 years and replaced by a vapid secularist discourse. By their own figures, the USA Episcopalians lost about 15% in average Sunday attendance between 1997 and 2007. An average Sunday finds only about 720,000 Episcopalians in church. The current rate of loss is about 1000 per week--a huge number when the average parish only has about 250 members. The U2 liturgy phenomenon has become moderately widespread and piggybacks on practices such as labyrinths and the like.
  • benedictgal
    Posts: 798
    That is scary. Now, I love U2's Gloria, but, not for the Mass. In fact, I don't know how we can equate them with handing down a true Sensus Fidei?
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,157
    The point of the event is not the worship of God as an end in itself, but the advancement of the UN's Millennium Development Goals. They're worthy humanitarian objectives, I trust, and presumably something that Bono supports.

    They're also the subject of much activity in Episcopalian officialdom, to the point of mockery from conservative Anglicans such as blogger Chris Johnson of St. Louis (themcj.com). Johnson always refers to the MDGs as "the Millennium Development Goals [peace be upon them]".

    For what it's worth, York Harbor, Maine, is an affluent village with historic houses and, of course, seaside views, a few miles north of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

    If anyone would like to see more of "u2charist" services, a search on youtube.com will find several video examples.
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