Catholic Sensibility

We missed World Mission Sunday at my parish. There was the 9.6 minute video presentation, "The Truth About Cloning" after Communion at all Masses. Homilies were shortened to get the folks out in an hour. I'm also the closest thing to a tech guy at the parish on Sundays, so it was left to me to make sure the hook-ups were in place for Bishop Finn and the various lawyers and mostly doctors assembled for the dvd presentation. My poor wife made two trips to a local site (which shall go nameless) to get the hardware for me to attempt to wire the dvd player & projector into the sound system. On trip one, the guy talked her out of getting what I needed and sent me a useless stereo adapter instead. Even so, the assembled hardware from trip two didn't do the trick either, so I was left with the Bronze Age solution of holding a microphone to the projector speaker. I laugh when people think of me as a liturgical nazi. I probably should've bowed to the pastor's wisdom when he suggested we might forego the presentation during Mass and do what the dicoesan RTL office said we shouldn't do: set the program up to run at coffee and donuts or something. But I thought that we owed our bishop some support on his first big public issue. I found it interesting that our vicar general didn't even know the video was being distributed to parishes this weekend. Communication is probably not one of our diocese's strong points this year. The Star's lead editorial today urged readers to vote for amendment 2. Interesting timing. Our parish has done a great deal to promote opposition to amendment 2, but I have to confess I'm picking up on some battle fatigue from the troops. I don't have a sense that this weekend we did much more than bring six celebrations of Mass to a crashing halt after Communion. (If any parishioners are reading this, please post here or e-mail me; I really want to know what you thought: bad and good.) And after a mass mailing, weekly articles in the diocesan paper, and at least two pulpit talks (I can't call them homilies, really) I suspect we've shot the wad on the issue already. Did anybody outside of Missouri have any success with World Mission Sunday? I'm not even going to ask about James and John imitating non-believers by lording it over the others. We'll come back to that in 2009. With any luck.