Orange, Calif., Nov 1, 2018 / 04:16 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- On any typical weekend, the white cassock-clad priests of the Norbertine order from St. Michael’s Abbey in southern California preach in about 35 parishes, sharing the fruits of their contemplative and communal life with the Church.
As canons regular, they are religious priests who live in community and share a charism and common life of prayer. During the week, they are teachers and preachers in area schools, colleges, and catechetical programs.
But the order felt called to bring their preaching and formation beyond the bounds of their abbey and apostolates in the Orange County and Los Angeles areas, and so on All Saints’ Day they launched a digital library called “The Abbot’s Circle” which will provide video, audio, and written resources on the Catholic faith.
“Many people, after they’ve gone through Catechism or Catholic school, they lack further formation in their faith,” Father Justin Ramos, O.Praem., a priest of the order and a Latin teacher, told CNA.
“The Abbot’s Circle is really a great means for people to be able to hear homilies during the week, not just on Sunday, or read reflections and learn about their faith in the various ways in which we offer it.”
The Abbot’s Circle website includes video, podcasts and written reflections, as well as chant recordings and audio lectures and a documentary on the fathers called “City of Saints.”
The digital library, which is free for the first two weeks of its launch, will be a subscription service that donors will be able to access for a monthly donation of $10 a month or more.
Shane Giblin, chief advancement officer for the Norbertine Fathers at St. Michael’s, said the platform was a way to thank and spiritually feed the order’s benefactors, while contributing to the day-to-day costs of running the abbey.
“The guy in the pew on Sunday who’s just trying to make his life work, we want to reach that person and help him make sense of his life and help him grow spiritually,” Giblin told CNA.
“The beauty of the Norbertines is watching them meet people where they’re at…whether they’re highly engaged Catholics, or just very eager to learn more about the faith, or whether they’re just new to their faith and wanting to learn more, they’re able to reach them in a very unique way,” he said.
New content will be added to the platform will be added every week, Giblin said, and will answer such questions about the Catholic faith as: How do we attain salvation? Why do we pray to the saints? What role does Mary play in the life of a priest?
Giblin said the website allows users to submit their questions and prayer intentions, and the frequency of new content allows the priests to respond to the needs of the people using the platform.
The Norbertines also believe The Abbot’s Circle is one way their order is called to respond to the current crisis of abuse scandals in the Church.
“St. Norbert, a Catholic reformer, founded the Norbertines to lift up a demoralized clergy, preach to the lay faithful, and so renew the Church in difficult times,” Fr. Chrysostom Baer, prior of St. Michael’s Abbey, said in a statement about The Abbot’s Circle.
“We are fulfilling this very same mission today, in a time when both laity and clergy are demoralized by scandal, by using new media to connect with the faithful and offer support and guidance. While atypical for religious priests to use digital media in this way, we believe in the power of new media to reach out to the faithful and support them in their faith lives.”
Ramos said he thinks the digital library will offer Catholics hope at a dark time in the Church, particularly in knowing that there are orders of priests striving to live holy lives and to teach the faith in line with tradition and the magisterium of the Church.
“The message that we want to convey to people is that there is hope, and part of that hope is to know your faith well and to be able to live it out well, and it empowers the layperson to understand more about their faith and defend it,” he said.
“Our faith is always tried when things like this happen, and to strengthen it, it’s just one way to help,” he added.
Fr. Ambrose Criste, O.Praem., who serves as novice master and director of vocations and formation for the order, told CNA he thinks The Abbot’s Circle responds to Catholics who are “hungry” for good formation.
“They’re hungry for clear doctrine – what does the Church teach and what does the Church believe? I think there’s so much confusion that comes from the world and the mainstream media, and from to be honest from much of the Catholic media,” Criste told CNA.
“And so clarity of doctrine is something that the faithful really want. They also want priests and consecrated religious who are striving for holiness and who aren’t afraid to talk about it, because otherwise I think what the faithful hear is the spirit of the world, and how that has infected even people in the Church.”
Ramos said The Abbot’s Circle is an “ingenious” way to live out the charism of the Norbertine order and to share the fruits of their contemplation, prayer, and community.
“What takes us away from prayer is our apostolic work, when we have to go into the parishes and we can’t be with the community. But now that we have this means to communicate and to proclaim the truth of our faith…and I think it reinforces our way of life because we don’t have to do as much exiting from the monastery as we would otherwise have to do in order to reach a greater audience.”
The launch of The Abbot’s Circle follows the end of a successful $120 million capital campaign by St. Michael’s Abbey to support the building of a new abbey, as the order is running out of space for its new members. It also follows a documentary series on the order called “City of Saints”, which was released last year.
“Holiness is attractive, young men don’t want to live their lives by halves,” Giblin said. “They want what the Norbertines at St. Michael’s have, and because of that we ran out of room.”
The abbey currently supports 38 seminarians, with three aspirants on a waitlist. Giblin said the community has become the “unsung heroes” of the Church in southern California, where they are renowned for their holiness, service and preaching, and that the new platform is another way to share their gifts with the world.
“Holiness is attractive, and people are looking for that in the modern world, and they invest money in it because they crave it, they want more of it,” Giblin said. “And we hope The Abbot Circle website is a larger platform to showcase the holiness of the men here, and I think the world is very much hungry for that.”
[…]
This is a matter of priorities. I would like to know how bad it is to be defined “gravely immoral”? Catholics have a penchant for labeling those who seek to defy their dogma. The damning of a poor soul is not so prevalent in other Christian faiths. They walk a tight rope to heaven while Catholics use a piano wire, (much more difficult). We seem to be struggling with a barren woman and wishes to assign a surrogate to the duty of bearing the embryo. I ask, what priority does this have in the broader scheme of life? Is there priority of casting dispersions on the mother and surrogate over caring for the Trump abandoned babies on the Mexican border? How can we have a higher priority than aiding the people being raped and murdered in Syria, Yemen, Rwanda and Myanmar? Who would not place a high priority on nuclear annihilation? Even Pope Francis is on the side of the world’s Eco scientists. I am not a tree hugger. I am a forest hugger. Perhaps the highest priority order is getting the global warming souls to accept that human activity is the greatest contributor to climate change. My fourth degree knight brother-in-law thinks in old Catholic terms when he rejects controlling the expanding population. He was quick to support the church’s pedophile disgrace by saying “it was only a small number of priests”. If SM is the highest priority, I may be missing the point. I will try to save my soul if one cannot be “gravely” damned for speaking out. However, I must exercise caution… I have neuropathy in my feet and I would have a problem walking a piano wire.
No, morgan, it is not a “matter of priorities.” It is clearly evil – or clearly to anybody who isn’t blinded by hatred of any sort of discipline or dogma that disagrees with something that person wants to do.
“Catholics have a penchant for labeling those who seek to defy their dogma.”
Well, well, well: you’re finally admitting that you aren’t Catholic, having pretended that you were as you did your concern troll postings.
“The damning of a poor soul is not so prevalent in other Christian faiths.”
People can damn only their own souls, by sinning.
“They walk a tight rope to heaven while Catholics use a piano wire, (much more difficult).”
No; Catholics have a clear path, and there are strong fences protecting them from falling off the nearby cliffs.
“We seem to be struggling with a barren woman and wishes to assign a surrogate to the duty of bearing the embryo.”
So? Nobody has an absolute right to give birth to a child. And that’s the issue not “I want a child,” because there are many children who need parents; but that’s just not good enough for someone who demands *MY OWN BABY!*
Dragging in all those issues is ridiculous. “Well, it’s not nuclear annihilation, so I can go out and fornicate and steal and murder because that’s not nearly so bad.”
“Is there priority of casting dispersions on the mother and surrogate over caring for the Trump abandoned babies on the Mexican border?”
Presumably you mean aspersions. And the two are completely unrelated. In any case, those parents who put their children into extremely dangerous situations by using illegal methods to enter the United States don’t seem like the ideal people to have custody of a child.
“Perhaps the highest priority order is getting the global warming souls to accept that human activity is the greatest contributor to climate change.”
Pope Francis isn’t a scientist, and neither are you. https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018-GWPF-Lecture.pdf
“My fourth degree knight brother-in-law thinks in old Catholic terms when he rejects controlling the expanding population.”
In other words, your brother-in-law is a faithful Catholic and a decent man.
“He was quick to support the church’s pedophile disgrace by saying ‘it was only a small number of priests’
The number of pedophile scandals in the Church is very, very, very small. The number of predatory homosexual ephebophile priests, on the other hand, appears to be much larger.
“I will try to save my soul if one cannot be “gravely” damned for speaking out.”
What are you babbling about?
“However, I must exercise caution… I have neuropathy in my feet and I would have a problem walking a piano wire.”
Your problem is not with your feet, it’s with your mind and your will. You hate the Church’s teachings because like a small child you’re screaming, “Mommy, you never let me do *anything* I want to do! It’s not fairrrrrrrrrr!”