Behind the Habit Canon Regulars of St. John Cantius

great i'm father david uh with the canon's regular st john kanchis and and here i'd like you to hear first uh from our superior father joshua okay i need you to speak up for me a little bit because it's a little low i'm having i can't hear you very well how about that awesome no problem so i'm i'm delighted to um see all of you be with all of you here today my name is father joshua caswell i am the superior general of the canon's regular of saint john kansas we are a new community in the last 20 years we have 24 members and we are currently in two dioceses and three different houses and so a brand new community our community does the form of the mass and the extraordinary form as well as the ordinary forms we do both together and i've i came to this community when i was 18. i was came from directly from canada when i was seven when i was 18 and came across the border and i had a 2a plane ticket and i just fell in love with this new community here and i never left and so i've been here ever since and recently for the last year elected as the first superior after our founder but our community continues to grow we live the rule of sin augustine for me it was as simple as how do i want to spend my life so was it spending my life in terms of living uh giving my life totally for god and as as the church has always said man does not find himself until he makes a complete gift of himself so for me i had to make a complete gift of myself and that's been an absolute joy ever since in a constant ed adventure so cannons regular are like monks but in a parish setting so we live the monastic life but working in the middle of a city and so living praying the divination singing the glorion chants but in the middle of the city of four million people and other places where we are using uh doing all we can to make sure the sacraments are as available to the people of god as possible bringing the richness of the church the people of god so that's sort of an introduction to our community i'm very glad that all of you are able to get in our community i know the next uh this time ahead will be beautiful and informative our brothers have worked hard and i look forward to you uh learning a lot about our community so thank you god bless you thank you father joshua and uh as as superior pastor uh you can imagine he has a lot on his plate so feel free to leave anytime you need to but my name is father david yalawi i have been with the cannons regular for nearly 11 years now and ordained for just about a year and eight months so a newly ordained priest still and uh shortly after father joshua was elected superior of the the candidates regular he asked me to be the vocations director for the cannons so i'm acting now as vocations director and it's been a great opportunity to work with people like ronda with vocations ministry and and to do things like this to promote vocations in the life of the church i came to the canons by way of really what i would consider to be present uh in one way or another in any vocation any calling from god and that is i i developed a desire a true desire for holiness and the other thing that uh that came to me through uh through the calling of god was this uh what they often refer to as zeal for souls not only that that desire for holiness oneself but also that other people too may reach that same state of christian perfection and so that was really the impetus for my seeking vocation seeking the calling of god in my life and i came to the cannons regular because i grew in an appreciation for beauty and for reverence and that was something that i that i saw here in the work that the canons do and that zeal for souls and the beauty kind of mingled together in in everything that the canaans regularly do uh such as the the liturgy the celebration of the sacred liturgy and the way that it's carried out the hearing of confessions uh in this this church alone at saint john canchus every every week we hear on average of well over 500 confessions and so that that desire for souls to meet god to grow in holiness that restoration was sacred which begins in each individual human soul uh really all it all came together and so that's one one aspect of the charisma of the canons regular saint john can't just the restoration of the sacred uh will try not only to to speak about what that means for uh community but also to to show you uh some of what that means and i mentioned already one example uh confessions what happens in in the church here on a weekly basis in great abundance souls returning to god receiving that grace from our lord jesus and so that's uh that's just one example of restoration the sacred and here shortly i believe uh brother kevin is in the church and he'll show you a little bit more about the sacred and and what the restoration the sacred means for the cannons regular and we have one more introduction here i believe uh brother andrew oops okay i hope we didn't think but here here i am so my name is brother andrew i've been in the community for nine years now i'm a permanently professed member um and i'll be actually working the cameras today so i'm kind of the behind the scenes guy and i'll be introducing in just a moment i'll be introducing brother kevin who's gonna give us a tour of the church so if you'll excuse me for one second i'm going to go back to my uh back to my booth over here and operate all the cameras so thank you thank you and you can see here behind us as a backdrop uh and another example of of uh beauty in in the church um when we talk about beauty we know that beauty is a transcendent it's uh one of those uh qualities of god truth goodness and beauty now god is present in the church certainly he's present in the eucharist he's present in the sacred liturgy but he's present in a veiled way and something that the church has always tried tried to do through the centuries is to manifest that beauty to give expression to that beauty and so you see an example of that in these monsters the sacred vessels which contain the host the the veiled beauty behind the the sign of bread and wine but which the church gives manifestation through the work of human hands and the fabrication of monstrances investments all these things which carry with them that that beauty great great well thank you father david and father joshua i'm just going to go switch my view here now to the church and we'll meet brother kevin in just a moment here okay so we're looking at the church right now can everybody hear me can you give me a thumbs up elizabeth thank you awesome so yeah uh brother kevin uh uh it's up to you now where are you there you go there you are great hello how are you brother kevin i'm doing good thanks for having me on the show awesome so brother kevin before we start how about you give us a little bit of your uh background your vocation story sure yeah i found uh this parish saint john kansas um about 12 years ago my brother grew up in chicago we all did and he lived in the city here and he introduced it to me and i actually i didn't even know this was a religious community that was staffing this parish but he was attracted obviously to the beauty here and they have an amazing young adult group here and so i started coming somewhat infrequently and then when i started to discern my vocation more seriously i met with one of the priests here for spiritual direction and then i was like oh you guys are actually a community so i started to ask more questions about what it is that that happens here in religious life and that's when i realized that um there was a charism here that matched my heart and that was a zeal for souls and for restoration of the beauty of the church and maintaining and preserving the traditions of the church so what really drew me and what i saw not just by word but by example was that every priest and brother that was here really saw the church as their bride they really took their vocation seriously and there was a great love for the church as as a bride as a married bride and so that really spoke to the depths of my heart that that's how i see the church too and i didn't know that was there i thought i had a different terrorism or a different vocation but when it touched me personally that's when i realized i need to join and when i did i felt very much at home when i joined here so i joined back in 2016. so it's been a little over four years since i've been in the community and i'm a junior member and i'm in seminary formation at the moment awesome thanks brother kevin so i guess without further ado why don't we just take a look at the church here yeah definitely so if you want to go ahead and zoom out so they can see where we pray and where we minister to god's people oh there we go all right awesome so yeah this is such one of the things that always struck me when i first came to st john's was the beauty of the parish but one of the big things that always got my attention too was uh interestingly enough the floor so maybe we can start the with the floor and you can kind of explain what's going on there right so if you want to go ahead and tilt the camera down to me here um i'm in the front entry of the church and one of the first things is brother andrew said that you notice when you walk into the church obviously you'll see the beautiful altar the magnificence of the size of the church but the floor and the floor because it was one of the the biggest projects one of the first that we undertook because of its need and so this is a beautiful hardwood floor and the the design in it was not just meant to be beautiful but it was also to be catechetical and teach the faith and so that also speaks to uh what our charism here as cannons regular which is restoration of the sacred uh as i mentioned earlier that desire to restore those things which are sacred in the church and bring them back to their original beauty and luster and so we see here on the floor the star of david and so as we progress to the front of the church we'll see a series of icons there are four icons and they tell of the life death and resurrection of christ which is also extremely fitting because it speaks to the life death and resurrection of this parish so this parish was founded in the late 1800s and it was a thriving parish large polish community and then it went into decay in the mid-1900s because many people left uh the city and this parish was basically left to just fall apart literally and then when our community was founded in 1998 that's when the restoration and the resurrection started to take place and so we see here the beginning of the life of christ we see his roots in judaism and the cairo that you commonly see in many churches for the symbol for christ and we obviously know that christ is that fulfillment of the jewish faith he is the promised messiah the promised savior so we see that as the first icon and then as we move up the aisle here we see three crowns and symbolizing the three kings which came to visit christ at his birth the magi presenting him with gifts and then the third icon we see here are the symbols of christ's passion and death we have the crown of thorns in the middle and then inside are the nails from the crucifixion and the spear which was thrust into his side and then at the top here is one of the more fitting icons we have here which is the banner of the resurrection and the reason why this symbol was placed here when the floor was redone is to tie into the theme uh that we have here at the church which is resurrection and as brother andrew can show if he's able to zoom up on the ceiling here we have the elders of christ jump up there here we go there's a pretty good image of it i'm showing him on the two cam right now all right so brother kevin um so we looked at the floor the floor is beautiful but you also said it's catechetical as you mentioned that's part of our charism is that catechesis restoring the interior of the faithful as well as the exterior of the church um so you know you look around a lot you see a lot of gold you see a lot of uh different uh decorations and things like that do you want to speak a little bit about that and how that might tie in sure so in that in that aspect of restoration of the sacred is remaining true and uh faithful to the teachings of the church and preserving those traditions so many things that have been lost or forgotten over the years we try to keep that treasury if you will we kind of see ourselves as a treasury for the church of all devotions and traditions and one great example of that we have is the communion rail so up here at the front we see this what looks like a gate or a barrier and many people perceive it as such they see it as some kind of obstacle keeping us from from approaching the priests and what's going on however this communion rail is actually rooted great in great history in the church and so this comes from the tradition of the in the eastern church the iconostasis and in the western church the rude screen and the purpose of those uh which were seen as barriers much higher than this much taller was to veil that which is holy so the holy works that are going on in the mass the holy works that are going on that the priest is performing we keep veiled we keep set apart because that's what the word sacred means is that which is set apart that which is preserved for god and so similar to the old testament with the temple of solomon there was the holy of holies and that was veiled and so this is kind of a remnant of that temple or of the uh the veil in the temple which was rent in two at the death of christ on the cross and so we see you know not this tall wall this tall root screen but we see just a remnant left of that and as well you'll notice this white marble on top of the communion rail and the beauty of that is that actually it's the same marble that's on the high altar and so as you approach to receive holy communion and reverence as you kneel down here the priest comes and meets you at this communion rail which in a sense is like the people's altar because it's seen as an extension of that high altar and so in reality when you come here to receive holy communion you are closer to the holy sacrifice on the altar than you would be had this communion rail not been here so what is seen sometimes as a barrier is actually really bringing us closer to god but it gives us that message that this is now a holy place and we need to show do reverence to god that's one of the best explanations i've heard uh of the community rail so far so congrats to you on that um so i'm just going to flip to another um another angle here and i'm just looking at the high altar i'm looking at all the statues here on the altar um we've got four of them up there and of course the big painting in the center we'll get to that in a second but um so yeah we got a lot of statues around the church so what's with all the statues and how does that tie into what we do here right yeah so in again restoration of the sacred you'll probably hear us say that a thousand times but it's so etched into what we do here in the life that we take on and so obviously part of the tradition of the church is to have statues images holy things to remind us of god and so one of the things we have here obviously is an abundance of statues thanks be to god and it's not just about having as many as you can but these statues for the catechetical and theological purpose is to inspire us by the holy example that the saints lived by their holy life but the other aspect why we have them is because many of these statues were original to the church and this parish is over 100 years old so many of these things have fallen into decay and they needed to be fixed they needed to be restored and part of our instruction part of our charism is to not only live it ourselves but to have the people of god since we're in a parish part of our apostle appears in parish life is to get them involved to get them to be active christians and so by the grace of god and their talents uh they've been able to help us restore some of these statues and brother andrew if he hasn't already if he's able to queue up saint therese uh i got it right here beautiful yep we have a beautiful statue of saint therese that one of our parishioners actually just recently stripped down to its original core and was able to repaint it with oil paints and there was just a beautiful ceremony afterwards of a blessing of the statue and this is just one example of the many and how the parishioners have aided us in this mission excellent thank you so much for that explanation um so i'm back to you and uh i'm just gonna show everybody a uh close-up on the altar and maybe with this you know with the statues of the sacred images we have here in the parish um i think that's a good time to talk about uh saint john canchus uh and we'll look at that center image that we have on our altar yeah great so yes saint john kansas uh i i could imagine not many i'd be surprised if actually anybody who's on the on the call knew who st john kansas was before this call and honestly i had no idea who he was before i joined the community before i joined uh saint john kansas uh the cannons regular and saint john cantus was actually a polish saint in the middle ages so he's uh grew up in krakow and he was a professor there at the jagalonian university and not only was he extremely intelligent but he was a man of great virtue and piety and the beauty of this image on our high altar that brother andrew is showing you is that it really by the grace of god and providentially speaks to our charism of restoration of the sacred and so what you see there is what's known as the miracle of the jug and in the middle of the image there you see the jug and now this girl was passing through the marketplace there's a huge market right by the university and it's where people came to exchange and trade goods in order to have income for their household while this girl happens to be passing through she drops the jug and the milk goes everywhere so the income is now lost for their family so you can imagine how distraught she was well saint john can't just notice is this and in great pity her he approaches her and he picks up the pieces of the jug and miraculously restores it so there are no cracks left in it but he wasn't done there so he has her go down to the stream she fills it with water she brings it back to him and he blesses it and it turns into a sweet milk by the time she returns home and now why we have this image here and again why it's so providential is because we see in this image yes saint john can't just restored the jug he restored the exterior the shell if you will but the most beautiful restoration that took place was what happened inside the jug what happened internally which was that which had been spilt and lost had been restored not only to its original uh sustenance but possibly even greater than it was before and so what we see when we see that is we see the church we see in that jug an image of the church and an image of the human soul that people come here broken uh they need to be put back together but the most beautiful aspect that we do is not all the beauty as brother andrew spoke of that we see in the church but that beauty is a reflection of what we desire to see happen in the soul that we desire to bring people that restoration and healing and bring them back to god that's a that's a great pivot point um so maybe with that we can flip from the exterior the externals that we've been showing you in the church and maybe speak a little bit to the interior work that we do in souls uh as part of our apostolate right and i think and and i think that's the most important work and the one i'd like to emphasize most and again just to re-emphasize the beauty that you see here in the church as his brother andrew had pointed out its purpose is never the it's never an end the beauty in the church is never an end but a means and so when people see the beauty whether it be music or art it lifts us out of ourselves to something we always have this desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves and beauty has a great way of touching on that and so the hopes is that by drawing them and helping them to see and hear and experience things that are beautiful it will draw them to desire that interior beauty as well and two of the beautiful ways that the priest here are able to do that obviously is in the sacraments being reconciliation and the holy eucharist now confession um priests here every single day multiple confessions they hear during mass before mass after mass and even by appointment if need be and then also in the holy sacrifice of the mass now we obviously were the roman catholic uh right the latin right but we have two forms and many people may not know that we have one right but we have two forms so we have the ordinary form which is the form of the mass set in the vernacular it's the the common language of the area and we have the extraordinary form which is set in latin which is the traditional language of the church and the beauty of what we try to do here as i said earlier kind of seeing ourselves as a treasury for the church is to offer everything that the church has to offer to not hide any aspect but when you marry someone you love the whole person when you love someone you love the good and the bad you love everything about them and so what we try to show is not to hide any aspect of the church because everything about the church is beautiful and holy and so we offer four masses on sunday one of them being a low mass which is set in latin and then we have an ordinary form mass which is said in english and then a uh an ordinary form which is set in latin which many people actually get confused with the extraordinary form because they hear the latin but actually the 12 30 is our latin extraordinary form high mass and the beauty of that mass is it ties in and kind of completes that circuit of beauty and restoration and so at that mass the 12 30 high mass the choir sings in unison with the priest who's celebrating mass and so there's this beautiful interplay between the choir and the congregation and the priest and so what you'll hear on sunday is gregorian chant sacred polyphony all the beautiful traditional music of the church which was designed and created specifically for the sacred purpose and so as our founder had said when you come to mass when you come to church to pray god gave us a body right and we have senses in that body but we don't limit ourselves to worshiping god in one way but that we should worship god as moses said with our whole mind with our whole heart with our holy spirit and so we should be worshiping god with our eyes we see beauty we smell the incense we hear the sacred music we touch the holy water and we taste the holy eucharist and so every part of your senses is engaged in something sacred and holy when you enter into church and that's what we desire to provide for the people is that holy place to worship bravo on that explanation too that's one of the better ones i've heard um so uh so i just uh just to turn our attention really quick um another part of a key part of our life is the second liturgy of the church and i know you know what i'm talking about but maybe for some other people who might not be as familiar go ahead and maybe just give a little explanation of what i was just the second liturgy you're talking about is dinner right um but there is there is a truth to that and i and i do want to touch on that is that the meal time in community life is actually a beautiful and sacred thing you know so people see what we do here in church as something sacred obviously and and for god but the meal time is also in a sense an altar place it's like it's like a mirror yes it's a mirror of the liturgy like it mm-hmm so yeah so it's a secret moment of unity with each other exactly but i wasn't talking about i wasn't talking about dinner i was talking about the liturgy of the office the alligator of the hours of course so i'm just going to zoom back to our i'm just going to zoom back to our liturgy of the office uh preset here on the camera um but yeah go ahead and talk a little bit about that yeah so as most religious know and as well priests who make this vow is that they promise to play pray what is known as the divine office or the liturgy of the hours as brother andrew said and so the liturgy of the hours uh is exactly that it's the set of prayers that you pray throughout the day at certain hours now the beauty of the divine office is that we know that the mass and the holy sacrifice is the peak and summit of our faith the holy eucharist but we don't want that to become just an isolated incident in our day or a moment at which we you know we come to morning mass we receive our lord and we go throughout the day and maybe we kind of get lost we're human you know we have distractions but the purpose of the liturgy of the hours is to extend that sacred moment throughout the day and so we pray at different hours throughout the day there's five of them that we pray we have morning we have mountains and logs morning prayer in the morning we have midday prayer at noon we have vespers or evening prayer uh around 4 30 and then we have which we also pray the rosary at that time as well and then we have compline which is night prayer and all of these offices except the morning prayer we sing and we chant it's a combination of latin and english and so all of the brothers if you can't sing that's totally fine i knew nothing of singing when i got here i knew nothing of gregorian chant but you're instructed on that and you kind of absorb it and pick it up as you go along so if anybody's thinking like well i don't know latin i don't know how to sing please don't be afraid because there's so many people who joined the community who had no no background in that but i think brother andrew has a yes as a as a trained musician i can attest to that truth so uh don't don't worry yeah brother howard was very kind of helping uh myself and many of the other brothers get trained in music so awesome well i'm gonna switch over to the video that we have so the video i'm going to show you guys is a uh is the back half of compliment it is uh the marian antiphon and procession that we do at the end of compliment and so uh we'll get to hear that but for now let's say goodbye to brother kevin and he can run over to our next location uh so bye brother kevin i'll see you later all right thanks brother andrew see you guys [Music] christ our lord [Music] hey [Music] [Music] so [Music] ah [Music] oh [Music] [Music] jesus [Music] two we are peace [Music] hey [Music] uh so we're over here with father david and uh brother kevin's operating the camera over in the cannery so he'll give you a quick tour of our residence in the cannery father david up to you great so welcome to the cannon ree i know i saw that uh someone had asked where do the cannons live well this is where we live the cannon reed gatorade you think of uh rectory where the rector lives the cannon is where the cannons live now this particular part of the cannonary is part of the cloister most monasteries that you go to have have what they call a cloister it's a space set apart solely for the members of the community now as father joshua mentioned we are kind of like a monastery within the context of a parish and so you can imagine the difficulty of balancing the two elements of our life parish ministry and religious life in which we are truly seeking union with god and so it's necessary that we do have this this cloister this part set up part for us for rest for prayer for study and just an example of you know how close we are to the city uh from this vantage point in the canary you can actually see some of the skyline we are merely blocks away from downtown chicago and so as busy as it is often here at a parish in downtown chicago we still have this place solely set aside for the community for that purpose of seeking greater union with god now this part of the cannery of our residence is the novice quarters this is a common room of the novice floor and this floor is solely for the the those members that are beginning their formation in the division and it happens that we have one of our novices with us and he's going to introduce himself and tell a little bit about his vocation and the division uh hi my name is brother matteous i'm a second year novice and i come from poland so how did you uh you know find the community you're from you're from poland but how did you hear about the cannons regular all the way in poland sure so uh i guess i shot i shall start that when i was younger i always wanted to get married i didn't consider religious life as my vocation only last years through some events in my life some experience i started to discern this possibility i'm interested in two things i'd like to bring more reverence toward blessed sacrament of the altar toward our most holy eucharist as well as build unity between people who attend both forms of the mass ordinary and extraordinary form of the mass personally i was looking for a fulfillment in my life i can mention like a task life commitment so i can give up myself to this and i shared those desires with one deacon in poland and he told me about this community so at the beginning i didn't consider that i would have to go abroad but people do this for the sake of job or because of health issues so why not for the vocation and i also met one priest of this community father dennis kolinsky who inspired me to come here so you met him uh because he was a mutual friend of this deacon correct correct they knew each other they may as far as i know they met each other during liturgical conference in rome a number of years ago and that's why he he was aware of this community yes beautiful so uh you know you like father david said this is the floor at which you live so would you mind kind of giving us a tour of what the novitiate floor the cloister looks like sure please follow me so here is the library i don't know if you can see the library in here as you can see the library has books this as important as everything that we do in the church this is another part of our formation as priests and religious that is is extremely important uh because people come to us as priests and as religious and they're seeking guidance they're seeking to to learn something about god that they have not yet known and so they they approach us and so if we are to guide people if we are to show them the way to heaven the way to god we must ourselves know something about that and we have tremendous resources from centuries in the church of of writers authors the church fathers all the saints uh scripture of course and many scripture scholars just a wealth of wisdom and knowledge that we can just dive into so it's very important that we have this this library especially on the novice floor as they begin their their formation in community all right and now we'll take a look at uh one of the bedrooms one of the residents where the novices stay here oh it's empty here is an exemplary room uh maybe it is empty because it is waiting for you yes so the rooms here in the cannery as you see are fairly simple you have a bed which is necessary for rest you have a desk for study for writing perhaps correspondence with family friends but it is very simple and that's that's part of our our life as religious we take a vow of poverty which doesn't necessarily mean impoverishment but that we live uh simple lives we try to give great expression to the beauty and the reverence in what happens in the church and what happens there in the sacred rites and the liturgies but we ourselves live simple lives because as we are all trying uh journeying on our way towards heaven uh towards closer union with god we see it important to to be free of those attachments to worldly possessions which weigh us down so that we can be free to seek god with our whole hearts beautiful yeah so at the end of the hallway here and what we're blessed to have is also a chapel and so a necessary thing that father david spoke about is our need to draw closer to god as religious and so we're blessed to have a chapel here with the blessed sacrament on the floor at which you know many times throughout the day or throughout the night we're able to make visits to our lord in the blessed sacrament so welcome to the canonry chapel this is a place of prayer of recollection for the members of the candidate as it is part of the cloister and this also is a place where the entire community will gather usually on a monthly basis for a day of recollection here we receive spiritual conferences that don't have one of the public masses in the church we'll say a private mass here at this altar or perhaps one of the other altars that we have but this chapel actually is another example of of our work in restoration of the sacred this building initially was not a cannery but it was a convent attached to the parish was a parish school in that that school was taught by nuns by the school sisters of notre dame and they resided here in this convent now eventually in the 60s the parish saw a decline the school closed because there were there were not enough children left to fill the school therefore the sisters also left the parish this building sat empty for a number of years before the archdiocese took it over and they were using it as offices this part of the cannery of the convent became a library for their offices so you can see what was here what is here now was gone was taken out it was filled with metal shelves file cabinets the sanctuary there where the altar is was everything was painted over it was all white every semblance of the sacred had had disappeared when the archdiocese eventually gave it to the cannons regular as their residence we came in and we saw some some paint our founder saw some paint chipping off the wall and he began peeling it away and underneath was still the original stencil that existed in the chapel with the the nuns and so we we set to work and we restored this chapel to its original beauty its original purpose in the worship god and prayer for the members that live here yeah and i notice uh at the top here that something that i didn't notice actually tells about a year in the community is our charism written in latin on the top of the ceiling here you see insta sakura which means to restore the sacred and as father david said just another beautiful example here of bringing back that sacredness to the church and that which has been lost uh bringing restoration so i'm back again and i just want to also make like a nice segue for brother andrew here so we've seen we've seen uh the common area where we live where we pray we've seen the church where we pray and we minister to the people of god but the importance is also that we have a well-balanced life and so truly what we're lurking looking for is as father david said we're not completely monastic and we're not completely in perish life but we need a well-balanced life and so part of that also involves recreation working together hanging out together and so i think brother andrew has a video cued up for you guys to see a little bit about uh you know our our time off and our recreation awesome thanks brother kevin i'm going to switch that video right now and i'll see you back over here all right as vocations director i have the privilege of being the first person to be in contact with those people who are inquiring about our community often enough people's first impression of us as a community is from what they see online and when they see us in that media we come across as very serious and certainly the carrying out of the sacred liturgy is a very serious matter however i know that from my own experience when when i first visited the community i saw not only that solemnness and reverence in the liturgy that they so emphasized but in the fraternal life in the communal life i saw really a great joy a great joy of being brothers brothers in the lord and and that really came across as very genuine to me and so much so that that just in one visit it really truly felt like home behind every vocation there's a couple of realizations one that that there is someone greater than you and and two that he has something more to offer much more to offer than what what the world can offer i think some of the essential qualities of a candidate for the cannons regular are a docility a hostility primarily to the holy spirit to be formed by the holy spirit a willingness a willingness really to die to self going back to even the entrance date for a postulant june 24th the feast of saint john the baptist very significant because we take the model of saint john the baptist throughout our entire religious life that we may decrease so that he christ may increase and so that that docility and that willingness to lay down one's life is ultimately the the finest qualities of any religious above and beyond any natural talents and abilities that one think they may be able to bring to the community all right so we're back here in the museum room of our church and uh we're here to answer any questions or anything that you might have so uh rhonda if you want to take it away thank you so much this has just been so an incredible experience to see all of the facets of your life and of the parish and so thank you so much for showing us everything um so we've had a lot of questions we'll get through as many as we can um so is there a rule of life for the canon's is indeed a rule regular we are we are canon's regulator uh which doesn't i necessarily mean that uh that that we're very uh imaginative um but that oh in a sense because the word regular comes from the lab regular meaning rules so cannons are cannons that live under a rule and the rule we follow is the rule of saint augustine awesome can you come closer to because i'm having a hard time hearing it oops awesome i'm having a hard time hearing you if y'all can come closer to where the mic is or somehow amp up the mic a little bit that'd be awesome anything i need to say again so yeah i mean i missed part of that so it's the uh rule of canon right so regular regular comes from the latin regula which means rule and we follow the rule of saint augustine saint augustine uh initially was the first uh one to found a community of canon regular he wanted the priest in his diocese he was the bishop he wanted the priest in his diocese to live in close proximity to him and to to really help each other to grow in that holiness and then from there to go out and serve in the diocese and so he founded a monastery uh for his clergy and they lived under this rule when she wrote the rule of saint augustine so what it sets that apart that the rule of saint augustine versus other rules would you say uh the rule is kind of gusting if you if you uh read it it's actually quite short uh compared to the rule of saint vic then saint benedict which is not lengthy but it is longer than rule of saint augustine focuses on different elements but uh one thing that really comes across strongly in the rule of saint augustine is that that brotherly love that that love among brothers uh like the oil that runs down here is here is a soothing oil um so that's that's one of the things that really sets apart augustine okay great um so brother kevin maybe you want to take this one about um how are cannons encouraged to develop their interior lives sure yeah i mean it's uh i think it'd be pretty hard to advance in uh religious life or even your own prayer life with god without having an interior life so part of the formation here uh is as we we touched on you know there's the there's the spiritual there's the human formation there's the community formation and developing and then as you if you discern towards the priesthood of the pastoral um but the spiritual obviously kind of being that thread that goes across um across it touches on everything because of our mission of drawing closer to god as religious and so we're really encouraged here to um you know we have our own studies here so the novices go through some spiritual formation they go through some studies and uh teachings of the church and history church history but also encourage aside from that to develop devotions and um obviously we pray the rosary here as a community into the divine office so our life is pretty it's pretty well structured but there is free time to as we showed you the library many many books to pick up from time to time which i myself have you know we have so many examples of saints throughout history that have really lived a beautiful life a beautiful religious life and so we try to follow that example um and are encouraged to do so i don't know if you uh i don't know maybe i didn't hear but uh we also do a daily holy hour of course that's pretty much part and parcel of any religious life um so we're all we're doing it we are every day and that's a you know that place where we do uh where we sit down and have that one-on-one time with the lord and just grow in that relationship with christ awesome so do you take a vow of stability as well as poverty chastity obedience we do not uh profess a bowel of stability okay good question all right there were plenty of that were like several questions about that everybody's wanting to know how all about the vows um so i i see that you're all in classic so it's not necessarily a habit can you well or tell me what is what's that all about for you guys yeah sure yeah so it is our habit um it's just that our habit uh aligns very well with the um the clerical state because of uh the work that we do in parishes so it's just the standard the our cast i'll just stand up here the standard habit is just the sash the um rosary which kind of distinguishes it uh priests won't normally wear a rosary if they're wearing a casting um so we've got uh that's really the point that distinguishes it all otherwise it's just a regular a regular um i'll come up really close here we've got our um saint benedict crucifix here with the metal um and then we've also got our medallion here on the rosary with our lady of victory on one side and then on the other side we have the image that you saw in the painting on our high altar which is saint john canchus and that just says in latin st john can't just pray for us and um so yeah so that's that's really i guess the biggest distinguishing thing about our uh habit is the rosary but otherwise it looks like a regular cancer okay so we're we're running a little long everybody but i want to ask one more question brother andrew um can you tell me about because this one good question really came up about historical music and i think you're the one right you're the guy to ask if i'm not mistaken so the question was what is the emphasis on historical music in the daily life of the canons um you know i either die fine office and chant oh yeah well of course um chant is literally something we do every day um we're so in tune with chant um it's it's unbelievable most of what we do here if you were to take everything that we do in one lump sum and um you you kind of parse it out the majority of the scene that we do would be gregorian champ um we chant in the office we sing uh the office skins we chant the psalms we chant daily mass so our daily masses uh we try uh generally we we take the propers from the um from the uh gradually romanum which is the chant book of the church so we're chanting every single day and all the sunday liturgies there's always an element of chant uh occasionally we'll have some other music like sacred polyphony or even some orchestral pieces that are played or orchestral mass sun with our big choir i mean right now we're not really doing that but uh that that's a normal staple in our in our um rotation so fabulous all right i'm gonna i'm gonna launch our poll everybody for um this hour so you get ready to answer the poll questions and while they're answering the poll questions father david can you tell everybody if what next steps would be because you're not going to be in the discerner's hour what would be the next step do you have a come and see time for people to come i mean i know in pandemic time but normally is there an opportunity to come and see sure absolutely so i've been scheduling monthly to come and see visits or at least at least from uh the months of august september through april uh generally it's the summer months uh we're visiting with some other apostolates so uh don't have um visitors then and a lot of the members also make their home visits during the summer so the house is a little reduced in size but generally uh monthly uh at least once a month will welcome five to six uh visitors to come and if that's something that you're interested in uh all that's needed really is to send me an email locations at kansas.org you can send me an email we can begin that conversation you can also go on our website and fill out a form tell us a little bit about yourself express your interest in coming to visit and we can we can begin that conversation and and see where it goes and i can let you know the dates that are available um so yeah that's that's one way to begin the next the next steps awesome well we have um 71 of the discerners on the right now that are with us want to know more about you so that's really good news and um 95 uh those who are curious about a consecrated life i've said you've given him a greater understanding of religious life so thank you so much for for um sharing your lives with us and more about the canon's regular saint cancer because i think as you said i don't know how many people actually knew about him uh before this and what a beautiful thing to share about your your life and i'm so thankful for all of you god bless you thanks everybody

Channel: Vocation Ministry

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Id: l3SJuv0519E

Length: 55min 32sec (3332 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021