Reynold Hillenbrand and the Liturgical Movement

A heartfelt thank you to Mary Jane Ballou, harpist and schola director and all around swell person for pointing me toward this.

I admit to being the sort of careless reader whose mind often fills in the ends or middles of words often without regard to sense -- and in the several years that I have been attending seminars and buying books there, I was vaguely under the misapprehension that the imprint of Mundelein's Liturgical Institute was Hildebrand, as in "Dietrich von".

Anyway, plenty good things there, especially for those who from press of time, eccentrically fading eyesight, or intellectual laziness, (raising hand rapidly, three times in succession,) are more prone to finish an article than a book.

Although I would quibble with this quote from Mons. Hillenbrand on the first page of the exhibit:

The death of Christ was the central act of history.

Only His death? not His very life? or His resurrection? I really like the term, the bete noir of certain conservative Catholics with whom I fell in several years ago, the Christ Event, (although it sounds better in other languages -- in English, the word "event" is so blunt it is perfect for hyping a used car sale.)

I think it may be a failure to balance all the elements of the Christ Event, a disproportionate emphasis on His death that gave rise to the now all too common tendency, (inching toward heresy,) to ignore the death, the sacrifice the need for atonement -- after all, one wouldn't need to atone for the spiritual equivalent of a fractured femur, and we're not sinful, right? it's our brokenness that needs fixing...