Is it a concert?

I remember a friend in high school telling me that he was a junior cursillista. My father, a sister and auncle were also cursillistas.

What is a cursillista? A cursillista is a member of the Cursillo Movement, or Cursillos in Christianity (in Spanish: Cursillos de Cristiandad, short course of Christianity), an apostolic movement of the Roman Catholic Church. 

" It was founded in Majorca, Spain by a group of laymen in 1944, while they were refining a technique to train pilgrimage Christian leaders.

Cursillo is the original three day movement, and has since been licensed for use by several mainline Christian denominations, some of which have retained the trademarked "Cursillo" name while others have modified its talks/methods and given it a different name.

The cursillo focuses on showing Christian lay people how to become effective Christian leaders over the course of a three-day weekend. The weekend includes fifteen talks, some given by priests and some by lay people, those talks are called "rollos". The major emphasis of the weekend is to ask participants to take what they have learned back into the world, on what they call the "fourth day". The method stresses personal spiritual development, as accelerated by weekly group reunion (after the weekend)."

It was in the mananita or dawn serenade that I first heard of the cursillo songs -  sweet and touching songs of praise to God. And then these spread like wild fire, and were incorporated in mass songs during the late 60's. In the early 80's, the Charistmatic movement whose prayer meetings were punctuated by the Holy Spirit slayings started to flourish in the Philippines and their stirring song-invocations drew more and more people into their groups and events.

Yesterday, we were at the Eucharistic Chapel of the Lord for the nine a.m. Healing mass and before the final blessing, Fr. Mario Sobrejuanite called on the sax player of the choir, Joshua Espinosa, to play a jazz number, while a second collection for the formation of young priests was being done.

I thought for a second that I was in a concert of Josh Groban until I heard the final blessing. 

Click here to view the complete mass.