The Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake is pleased to announce that Monsignor James Moroney is the recipient of the Liturgical Institute’s first Spiritus Liturgiae Award. This award recognizes distinguished service to the Church in promotion of her sacred liturgy. A priest of the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, Monsignor Moroney was Executive Director of the USCCB Secretariat for the Liturgy from 1996 to 2007. He currently serves as Executive Secretary to the Vox Clara Committee. “Monsignor Moroney has labored tirelessly for years in helping to renew the Church's liturgy,” said faculty member and Assistant Director of the Liturgical Institute Dr. Denis McNamara. “He has taught and studied from the heart of the Church--and always accompanied by enthusiasm and good cheer.”
In his acceptance address, Msgr. James Moroney commented, making reference to the forthcoming new translation of the Roman Missal:
I thank you for this award. I am particularly humbled that it comes from such an esteemed and estimable organization as the Liturgical Institute, which in its first decade has succeeded in imbuing so many talented individuals, many of them present here this evening, with the spirit and the power of the sacred liturgy... how blest we are to be witnesses to the second springtime of the vision of the Council Fathers lived out in our own day, as we prepare to utter, in some ways for the first time, the ancient collects which define who we are and who we are supposed to be as we seek to move from ideology to worship, and from novelty to mystery, as we seek to desire not so much to change the Liturgy, as to be utterly transformed by it, as we seek to move from the prestige of being liturgists, to a recognition of our role as the very model of unworthy servants of this holy and living sacrifice.
Congratulations to both the Liturgical Institute on their tenth anniversary, and to Msgr. James Moroney.
