Dom Virgil Michel, OSB: Liturgy and Social Justice

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dom Virgil Michel, OSB was a visionary leader who recognized some problems affecting the Church of his day and believed that the way to fix those problems was through the liturgy. He recognized that by improving knowledge of and participation in the liturgy, and making the liturgy central to both catechesis and social justice, more people would come to know Christ more deeply, and would thereby be motivated to do great good. He spearheaded the liturgical movement, wrote texts to reform catechetics and religious education, and was active in the emerging social justice movement. He firmly believed “lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi,” which means “how you pray is how you believe is how you live.” Through founding the journal Orate Fratres and the Liturgical Press in Collegeville, Minnesota he had a profound influence on many who came later, but he died unfortunately young in 1938.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.
0:11.0	If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit American Catholic History.org
0:17.5	slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crowe.
0:20.4	And I'm Tom Crow. Today we're talking about
0:23.2	Dom Virgil Michael, a visionary and transformative figure in the history of the church in America.
0:29.2	He played a huge role in the development of the liturgical movement in this country, and he
0:35.2	had some very strong and revolutionary ideas about religious education
0:40.3	and catechesis.
0:41.7	So he had lots to say about two topics that you and I know a thing or two about.
0:46.1	You're a catechist by training, and I'm all about the centrality of the liturgy.
0:51.0	Yes, and as we were discussing this episode, we both were pleasantly surprised by a lot of
0:56.1	what he had to say about both topics. We did, but I also found a number of thoughts on liturgy to be
1:01.7	eh. Yes, and we'll talk about some of those, but you certainly appreciated his insistence on the
1:07.9	central role of the liturgy in the lives of Catholics, not just clerics
1:11.7	and those in religious life, but all Catholics.
1:14.0	Oh, yeah.
1:14.6	Lexerrandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi.
1:17.1	How we pray is how we believe is how we live.
1:20.0	Right worship brings right belief, brings right living.
1:23.2	And that, of course, ties into the part that made you smile.
1:26.1	He thought education, and in particular,
1:28.5	religious education, must be experiential and not just book learning. You are trained in all three
	...

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