Fr. John Cush: Christ is the True Vine, His Father is the Vine Grower, and We Are the Branches

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“Christ the True Vine” (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The image of the vine and the branches shows us the enormous worth of each human being, and the relation we have to one another.

By Father John Cush, EWTN News, May 24, 2021

Father John CushRecently, in my own reading, I had begun to examine the life and work of Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, a former rector of Mundelein Seminary and a pioneer of the Liturgical Reform in the 1940s and 50s in the United States. Hillenbrand was, by all accounts, a brilliant man but a difficult man. When he was renovating his parish church of the Sacred Heart in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1957 in accord with Pius XII’s encyclical, Mediator Dei, he wrote the architect whom he hired the following terse lines:

“I do not favor any of the conventional symbols that are used in Catholic Churches. If we have to use a symbol anywhere, I should prefer ‘the Vine and the Branches,’ which Christ used as a symbol for the Church, his Mystical Body.” …