"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Say, is it something they put in the holy water up there in Minnesota? From a biographical blurb on Michael Joncas:
The appearance of "On Eagle's Wings" in 1978 coincided with his MA in liturgy from Notre Dame, an academic pursuit that has since taken him to the Pontifical Liturgical Institute of the Pontifical Athenaeum, San Anselmo in Rome. During that interim, he was ordained in 1980 as a priest for the archdiocese of St. Paul/Minneapolis. In this Minnesota scene, he collaborated with two of his colleagues, Marty Haugen and David Haas, in producing some of the most effective music for the Church's worship that has appeared in the post-conciliar days…
His work causes one to muse over what some historians might see as a "Minnesota school of liturgical composition." It would be even more interesting for the cultural historian to discover the reason why, in the middle of the United States with so many Lutherans encircling the various Catholic centers of middle-European extraction, there exists such a formidable powerhouse of Catholic creativity. The Benedictines at Collegeville, the clean energy of the Midwest, Lake Wobegon--all of these factors confront us when we look at Michael Joncas with his enormous impact on the Church's musical life. Perhaps Horace Greeley was right after all about moving westward.
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