The renewal of the sacred liturgy continues apace – and for Jesse Weiler, director of the Liturgical Institute at St. Mary of the Lake University, Mundelein, IL, there’s no reason that renewal can’t take place – and even flourish – online.
The Liturgical Institute recently launched a series of online courses – consisting of five one-hour lectures on all things liturgical – and recent responses from those looking for good online content addressing the Catholic Church’s official body of prayer has encouraged Weiler.
Before the restrictions imposed by the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), the number of subscribers to the online courses, Weiler said, hovered around 400 – but after the stay-at-home mandates were issued in March around the country, those numbers more than doubled.
“We have 2,000 students – so we’re growing at a fast rate,” he said. “A lot of that is due to the fact that we recently released one of our courses entirely for free – our Introduction to Sacred Liturgy course with Christopher Carstens. We had that course for a couple years, but when the virus started to spread, I realized that people were going to be locked up in their homes and not have much access to the things they normally would. So I thought it would be a good idea to release one of our courses for free so people could be prepared for when they went to Mass again publicly.”
This sort of liturgical formation is the goal of the online program as a whole, Weiler said.
“Our whole purpose here is to see a renewal in the sacred liturgy, and so we don’t want to leave any stone unturned in the process,” he said. “Whether it’s a certificate or degree program, a podcast, a short video series or a virtual conference we’ll be running this summer, we want to make sure people have access to this content to help in the process of this liturgical renewal.”
The overwhelming response verified for Weiler what he already suspected – that there was a place for the liturgical renewal in the media platforms of the online revolution.
“Currently we have eight courses available, and we are releasing a brand new course every month,” he said. “We have a working list of another 10–12 courses we want to record. I have no reason to believe we wouldn’t stop releasing a new course every month, or updating content, or going a little deeper with the content we already released.
liturgy and discipleship which we did with Dr. James Pauley, a graduate of the LI. That is not a course we have in our catalogue for our degree program but it is important and relevant today.”
In the future, Weiler hopes to collaborate as well with dioceses and parishes, inviting them to integrate the online courses with their own training programs.
“For example,” he said, “if you have someone who is doing marriage preparation program at a parish or in a diocese, we just released a whole course on the sacrament of matrimony, with Dr. Perry Cahall, an expert on the sacrament of matrimony. You can imagine how important it would be for engaged couples to not only understand what they’re about to enter into as a covenant with each other and God, but also the rite itself – what they’re going to do at the Mass they’re preparing for, and the fact that in no other sacrament are the those receiving the sacrament also the ministers of the sacrament.”
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