Shaking at mass -- yet again
Speaking once more of shaking hands for peace at Mass, Reader Margaret chimes in on my reference to mass as a place to get the habit of feeling good about each other, attributed by implication to contemporary lit-niks, the folks who led our liturgical redo of the 70s and since then:
Alas, Church is NOT the place to feel good about each other. All of us who remember the old Mass know that the Mass is not about sentimentalism. It is the reenactment of Calvary, Christ's sacrifice reenacted on the altar. The new post-Vatican II Mass has hijacked its meaning and turned it into something that is about us and our relationship with each other. The true Mass, the pre-Vatican II Mass, is about our relationship with God. It is about us adoring God, thanking Him, being sorry for our sins, and asking for His grace and mercy.
The problem is that
modern Catholics do not know the Catholic Faith. They haven't studied it, it isn't taught from the pulpits, and they believe that the sentimental pablum they're being fed every Sunday IS the Faith. The post Vatican II Church is a counterfeit.
The same goes for the contemporary mass, which she also considers "counterfeit." On it she blames bad things that have happened -- "the pedophile scandal, lack of attendance at Mass, loss of belief in the True Presence in the Eucharist, loss of vocations, etc., etc."
If I do not go so far as to why we have our problems, I nonetheless appreciate her emphasis on mass as mystery with God at its center. Liturgical reformers decided they had a wonderful organization going to waste -- preserving tradition when it could be used to inculcate and enforce innovation. What had grown had to be rooted out and replaced with something they had conceived, which they presented as restoration. Conceivably it was, but was it amenable to being transplanted?
They were like socialists who plan the enconomy because they know better than what has grown or evolved. On their gigantic head trip, they knew what should be and won the day, employing totalitarian methods. For instance, Vatican 2 permitted vernacular, but they required it. Big difference. One thing led to another, and we have liturgy lite, full of sentimentalism, as Margaret says. It's silly, contrived, distracting from what's central. Mass became more prayer breakfast than sacred event.
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Reaction from NJT:
I've never been to a Catholic service, but there is no question as to where the Bethel Baptist Church stands in Schaumburg. It is a church that believes the Bible is the word of God. There is no confusion as to what the Bible says or teaches. The church emphasizes morality and what is expected of its members. There is no mincing of words from the minister. I leave Sunday School and church every week uplifted in spirit and determined to face the new week in a way that will be pleasing to all I meet and pleasing to God.
That's quite a testimony. There's more:
Today's sermon was especially meaningful for me. I was feeling down this morning over [recent disappointments]. This sermon helped me to understand that I was permitting myself to become overwrought emotionally by worldly things (politics) and my relationship with God was suffering.
That preacher was on target. She concludes:
I definitely wouldn't react kindly to the shaking thing.
Shaking again
In the matter of handshaking for peace at mass, no further adventures but these further thoughts:
* It cheapens the handshake, reducing it to a sacred symbol when it's one of mankind's most telling natural symbols. Natural in the sense that in our society -- the one which uses it sacrally -- it's a way to express friendship and camaraderie and dealmaking and many other good things. But the church hijacks it for its own purposes when it uses it at mass to signify and instill Christian charity.
* It often translates to nothing outside of mass. People pass you on the street who are big on the mass-time shake but have little to demonstrate by smile or word of greeting. One fellow walks along looking mad who at mass puts arm around (opposite-sex) parishioner whom he knows and wants to console. Church is the place to feel good about each other, but what about outside it?
Judas, he OK
About 400 of about 1,370 Gospel of Judas news stories say it's a Gnostic document, says the gospel according to Google. Too bad for us readers. Gnostics were gotcha writers who predated Christ. They rehabbed Cain too, portraying him as a decent fellow even if he did do his brother Abel in, and Esau, famous seller of birthright for mess of pottage. In this one they rehab Judas, "a good poster boy for the Gnostic movement." The news prompted one writer to Chi Trib -- not for or in it, thank God -- to call for his canonization, arguing that there would be no Christianity if not for St. Judas.
Gnostics -- opposite of agnostics, remember, the prefix "a" being Greek for "non" -- were know-it-alls. Rather, they knew things the rest of us didn't. How did they know it? They just knew it, that's all. You had to join.
Meanwhile, Chi Trib's John Kass celebrates Easter with the frankest statement of faith in a daily newspaper that I have seen. Not even op-ed writers are as clear, being at pains to win over the other side and not too sharply to delineate their own. He swings from the Eastern Orthodox side of the plate but is kind enough to go Easter today, not next week.
He notes his secular-media colleagues' penchant for "skittish" approach to religion but "dogmatic" approach to "scientific progress [and] the ability of government officials and technology and reason to solve the problems of the modern world" and the like, but begs not to offend. "My sins haunt me," he says, "and what they've left behind reminds me that I'm nobody to tell others about what should be in their hearts."
Hollywood's doing the "Da Vinci Code," he notes, however, and there's the Judas gospel, covered "as if it were a missing companion to the other four" when it never was even a runner-up. They both feature doubt, and no doubt about it, "doubt sells." Put another way, "Jesus saves--circulation," a friend at a newsweekly told him. Put yet another way, man biting dog is headline stuff; so is the St. Judas idea. And promoting it may even be rich fun for the promoters.
National Geographic Magazine, for instance, says the newly discovered document offers "new insights" into Judas. They collaborated in its discovery and are in fact selling it.
It ain't all bad news on the Christian front, however. Yesterday's page one story on Holy Family RC church, in Inverness, by Chi Trib's Margaret Ramirez, was on the mark as depiction of energetic competition between Christian camps for spiritually hungry parishioners. Holy Family got its start as alternative to Willow Creek "mega-church" three miles away, she reports. Cardinal Bernardin put it in play. What the hugely successful Willow Creek thinks about it is not mentioned, but one can allow a little entrepreneurship in these matters, and this startup is thriving. (So is Willow Creek, we presume.)
Holy Family competes in Wesleyan fashion with Willow Creek, applying the latest in Evangelical-church devices -- big-screen shots of hymn lyrics, for instance -- and at least one very old one, a baptism-by-immersion font. There would be no kneelers in the recently renovated building -- sanctuary, say Protestants, body of the church or just church, say Romans -- but Downtown said put 'em in, exercising some very non-evangelical central control. Cardinal George is fingered as the authority in effect, which he most certainly is. But Cardinal George, are there kneelers in St. Peter's in Rome? (No.)
Food, glorious food
Food writer Mickey Fenix, of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, wonders “what it is with Jesuits and food” after she heard from two of her countrymen stationed in the U.S., responding to comments about Filipino food, one of whom recommended two web sites — The Jesuit Gourmet and Jesuit Recipes. "Food must be one of the things one must enjoy to be a Jesuit," she (he?) concluded.
That with the recent Chi Trib magazine cover story about Loyola U.-Chicago’s immensely successful president, Rev. Michael Garanzini, SJ, in which his culinary efforts feature prominently, makes an ex-Jesuit wonder whether he missed something or how things have changed since 1968, when the heralded piece de resistance was corn bread and stew for breakfast.
Ass what??!!
You deserve to know about this discussion by Maggie Bowman of an urban Catholic phenomenon called -- get this -- "ass Mass": It's a Catholic mass geared towards young adults who might want to kill two birds with one stone. Find God and find a honey, all in the same building, all in the same hour.
Read it.
