Liturgy Lines

LITURGY SNIPPETS ON THE WEB

Several times I have been asked if there are websites that provide short items about liturgy for personal information or as a source of ‘liturgy snippets’ for parish bulletins. Here are some sites that offer good material on liturgy.

www.rpinet.com/biindex.html provides quick and easy access to Paul Turner's inserts on liturgy from the journal Ministry & Liturgy produced by Resource Publications, San Jose, USA. The “Bulletin Insert Index” gives the title of each published bulletin insert and indicates which issue of Ministry & Liturgy it was first printed in. For those inserts that have been made available in collections, there is information about which volume of ML Bulletin Inserts it can be found in. There are just over 200 items in the index, but only 26 of these are available on line. The titles on offer, however, cover a wide variety of subjects of current interest and ongoing relevance. Each article is around 280 words in length. The only drawback with this source of excellent catechetical material on the liturgy is that copyright permission has to be obtained from the publisher for them to be reprinted. An Annual Reprint Licence costs $US40 per year.

The Bulletin Bonanza site, www.catholic1.com/bulletins/, is well worth a visit. It has graphics and, more importantly, brief items for each week of the three-year cycle of readings. For each Sunday there are one or two short pieces on themes that appear in the readings for the day, a brief item dealing with a liturgical question, a joke of the week, a quote of the week, and a puzzle.
Any of the material on this site can be freely reproduced in any non-profit publication. All articles are in plain text and may be used in most word processors or publishers. There are two versions of each text, one with line breaks for easy reading, the second with no line breaks for copying directly into word processors.

www.hometown.aol.com/liturgies/Dig_1.html is the Digital Liturgy site. Its 'Liturgy Corner' is worth visiting for suitable material to use in parish bulletins. Here James Setelik, John Kasper, Richard S Knapp and Ed Horodko give responses to a variety of liturgical questions. Current topics include sacristans, bread and wine, incense and environment and art. There are no barriers to reproducing the material.

www.creighton.edu/~rocsj/ takes you to Liturgy: The Source and Summit of the Christian Life by Roc O’Connor sj. Amongst the offerings here are two that are well worth a visit - ‘Introduction to a Method of Liturgical Planning’ and 'Liturgy Planning for the Church Year'. The latter provides a process and material for preparing Advent, Christmas, Lent and Holy Week/Triduum. Whilst there are headings for Easter Season, Ordinary Time and Feast Days, no material is available at present. What is there, however, is very good. The section on Lent, for example, provides a brief history of the season and good information on the structure, origins, and contemporary practices associated with it. While the section on the Triduum is not nearly as extensive as what is on offer for Lent, the material that is there on the meaning of the Triduum according to church documents is useful.