Make Your Lent Beautiful with Lent at Ephesus | Christopher S. Morrissey | CWR
A practical guide to incorporating the latest hit album from the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles into your Lenten meditations.
Lift high the cross? Yes, and right to the top of the classical music charts.
With their third hit album in as many years, the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, have done it again. They are at the top of the Billboard Classical chart. And this time, they are proclaiming the love of Christ with a terrific new CD that is packed full of Lenten repertoire.
The album is called Lent at Ephesus because, since 2006, these cloistered nuns have been in the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri at the Priory of Our Lady of Ephesus. The nuns, in their daily liturgical practice, are accustomed to chanting the very best of the Church’s musical treasures. They follow a monastic horarium as laid out by St. Benedict in his Rule. They chant the Divine Office together eight times a day in Latin according to the 1962Breviarium Monasticum.
Their first album, Advent at Ephesus (2012), spent six consecutive weeks at number one on Billboard’s Classical Traditional Music chart. Their second album, Angels and Saints at Ephesus (2013), spent 13 consecutive weeks at number one on the same chart.
What is so wonderful about each one of their CDs is that these nuns sing with such remarkable sincerity. They thus reveal to the listener why this traditional music exists: namely, in order to embody the lovely movements of a prayerful heart.
Pope Francis garnered much attention when, in Evangelii Gaudium, he condemned what he called “narcissistic and authoritarian elitism” (EG 95): “In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. In this way, the life of the Church turns into a museum piece or something which is the property of a select few.”
As if to illustrate precisely the opposite—how to avoid “narcissistic and authoritarian elitism”—the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, have made this beautiful music easily accessible and widely available.
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