We have lost our minds..

Letter to Mary K. Lastima, the grand finale.

It must seem a little far fetched to you, that somehow the banality with which the liturgy is celebrated by many officiants, the prevalence of abortion and the worship of demonic spirits are somehow all tied together. Perhaps I should throw in space aliens and Bigfoot while I am at it.

I say the Mass of St. Pius V (more commonly called the Tridentine Mass) regularly.  I more often say the Mass of the Venerable Paul VI (commonly called the Ordinary form of the Novus Ordo. I am not opposed to the Mass of Paul VI. I actually love it. It is the Mass that I have mostly said all of my priesthood. My problems are not with the Novus Ordo, so called, but with the outrageous manipulation of the liturgy for personal or political motives. I think of liturgies with giant paper mache heads, old women dancing in flowing skirts and fat men dancing about in tight white pants, or I think of para-liturgies that feature angels roller skating to circus music. I’m not making this up. You can look this stuff up at the following sites.

Liturgical Abuse: Puppets (WCCTA 2008)

And in the next one, the men are not as fat, but they are still wearing white. Why do large liturgical men favor white when black is so slimming?

Novena Solene | Entrada da Bíblia - 3º dia - dia 05 de Outubro

I love the Mass of Paul VI. I remember once reading that the liturgy of the Latin rite is characterized by its simplicity and dignity. One is reminded of that old song, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.”  Paper Mache dancing heads and fat guys in white pants? Dignity? Simplicity?

Still, I maintain that the simplified Mass of Paul VI offered the way intended is very beautiful. The way we priests have mangled it has lowered our standard of the sacred, with horrifying consequences. The Mass as said in many parishes is a venue for rebellion, not for worship. “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.” (1Sam. 15:23) I am regularly asked why a priest changes the Mass, or uses his own words or leaves part out while he puts in things that aren’t supposed to be there. It is simple. He is a rebel and “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.”  Three thousand years ago the prophet Samuel saw a connection between the abuse of liturgy and the demonic. Look it up: First Book of Samuel the 15^th chapter. Saul offered sacrifice which was forbidden to him and for this he lost the crown and his life, as well as the life of his son, Jonathan.

Have you ever read the Book of Wisdom, also called the Wisdom of Solomon? It’s one of those extra Catholic books. You would have read, “…through the envy of the devil came death into the world.” For what, you may ask, is the devil envious of us? He is immortal; he is immeasurably smarter and more powerful than we. This, too, is simple: Angels don’t reproduce, and the devils, who are fallen angels, can only steal our children. God shared something with us that He didn’t share with the angels. We can create something immortal.

God creates the soul, but a man and a woman in their coming together create the body, which is immortal, if Christ’s promise of resurrection is true. Humanity in its art and in its children shares the creativity of God in a way that angels cannot. Therefore, the devil hates art and beauty, for which the Catholic Mass and Catholic churches were the principle venue for a thousand years. The devil has convinced us to swap the amazing music and architecture of Catholicism for ugly buildings and banal music. The simplicity dignity and beauty of the Latin rite, both in the new mass and the old, gives way to the spectacle of the circus. But more than art, the devil hates children. They remind him that “God so loved the world.” In his diabolical envy, he has contrived to create sterile art and sterile marriages. Abortion, artificial birth control, rampant divorce, same sex marriage, on-line and off line pornography. They are the utensils with which the devil devours children and we feed them to him as surely as our forbears threw their children into the fires of the demon-god Moloch, all for the sake of our well being and prosperity.

Why do I lump divorce in with all those other more clearly anti-reproductive activities? Simple: Children need stable homes in which to flourish. Even faithful marriages between men and women who cannot themselves have children strengthen the dignity and reverence in which marriage and the home are held. If the sacredness of the bond between a man and a woman can be cheapened, then children may be born, but in their hearts they usually can’t flourish.

The Latin word sacrament means an oath to the death. We have reduced it to a show, a kind of entertainment, and shamefully this is not just done at the new Mass, but I have seen Tridentine Masses where it is all about the show. The degradation of one sacrament, the breaking of one solemn oath hardens our hearts. We receive the Body and Blood or the Lord without reverence, without “discerning the body” as St. Paul says, and we likewise have no trouble breaking the oath that gives life in the flesh after we have cheapened the oath which gives us life in the spirit.  I cannot fathom how a person can think that the pleasures of what is most certainly an aberrant, use of our bodies, even if it is pleasurable to some, can be compared to the sacred, life-giving secret shared by a husband and wife.

I said earlier, the devil hates good art and the devil hates children, He has tried to teach us that sexual desirability is the ultimate beauty. We go to the gym, the diet clinic and the plastic surgeon to keep ourselves physically desirable. All the while we remain morally and spiritually weak and deformed. We are cheap paintings in expensive frames. We are fifty dollar haircuts on seventy five cent heads. When we mistake the paint, the hair dye and the varnish for beauty, we are fools. True beauty lifts us to God. False beauty fixes our eyes only on our desires. True beauty makes us better. False beauty makes us less. False beauty ties us up in our own needs and fantasies. It fixes our gaze on the filth beneath our feet, not on the stars over our heads.

How can what the modern world calls love ever be compared with that love that brings new life? The disordered desires of the modern marriage movement bring nothing but passing pleasures that are soon devoured by boredom and regret. I know three things that are beautiful: a simple Mass, an old couple and a newborn baby.

A simple Mass simply said, lifts the heart and mind to God. A simple Mass doesn’t entertain. It brings heaven down to earth and earth to heaven in the flesh and blood of the Savior made present on the altar.

The charm of a young couple in love cannot be compared to the beauty of an old man and woman, who after a life of faithfulness walk hand in hand with each other and call each other by names like “sweetheart,” or “Mama” and “Papa”. 

And more beautiful still is that ultimate work of art, fashioned by the Maker of all things in a woman’s sacred womb: a child. Is there anything more wonderful than that little bundle of hope that reminds us of God’s great love? We have trashed the churches and murdered the children, all in the name of progress, freedom and tolerance.

We have lost our minds.

The Rev. Know-it-all

The fruits of Liturgical Chaos

Letter to Mary K. Lastima continued

When last I wrote, I tried to make the farfetched argument that “…liturgical chaos spawned moral chaos which in turn spawned abortion, infanticide and abortive artificial birth control, and you see, the devil hates babies.”

At face value this seems both simplistic and absurd. Allow me to invent my own wacky conspiracy theory. The madness that engulfed the Catholic Mass in the mid-1960s had consequences that went much farther than people realized. The wholesale de-formalization of the Mass changed the way Catholics looked at themselves and the world. When one fifth — give or take — of the world’s population changes its way of thinking, living and praying, that’s huge, and that’s exactly what happened in the 1960s. We Catholics lived in a hierarchical Church until the Mass changed. Hierarchy is of course a bad thing in the eyes of modern people. I recently heard about an interview in which the products of modern American education were astonished that the earth moved around the sun and that President Roosevelt had died. The product of modern education and culture are for the most part as well educated as gravel. Where was I? Oh, yes moderns dislike hierarchy, but they don’t have a clue as to what it means.

It is assumed that hierarchy means chain of command. It doesn’t originally. Hierarchy is a Greek word that means sacred leadership. I know of only two forms of sacred leadership: the bishops of the Catholic Church and the original hierarchy: Mom and Dad. The old Mass embodied hierarchy. The priest went into the holy of holies, the sanctuary and spoke to God. Nothing was given him except through the hands of those ordained. The deacon gave him bread and he offered it to the Lord. The deacon gave him wine and he offered it to the Lord. The people didn’t do much. They responded and prayed along quietly. The priest assisted by deacon and sub-deacon went into the sanctuary to intercede for the community. There were moments when the priest could not be heard. There was no microphone at the altar. It was as if parts of the liturgy said “I’m talking to God, not to you. Mind your own business!” How insultingly un-democratic.

There were times when we could not see or hear what was going on. All we could do was look at the play book i.e. the missal. There was a clarity of roles and everyone knew the drill. It sounds awful to modern ears, but if you’ve ever seen it done it is a fascinating thing to watch, almost like a ballet. The new Mass was designed to be less mysterious, but mystery was not thrown out all together. That came later. I remember the day it happened in my life. I was about 15 or 16 years old. We lived down the street from the church and we were about to have our first home Mass. Until that time a Mass could only be offered in a public place of prayer, for instance a church. Masses were meant to gather the faithful together, and were never thought of as private celebrations. Somehow we thought that private Masses would democratize things. Go figure.

The young cool priest in our parish was coming to our house to celebrate Mass on the dining room table. People kept asking, “Can I come?” We managed to cram 50 plus people in our house and a choir of nuns with guitars. It was well-intentioned chaos. We thought it must have been like the early Church, so informal, so homey. Why we thought that I have no idea. There is no evidence for the assumption that the first Christians celebrated Mass on dining room tables, but it just had to be true.

Needless to say the celebration had all the dignity of a coffee klatch as we slouched around sitting on radiators and folding chairs etc. trying to get a good look at what was going on. I kept thinking maybe we should move it down the street to the church where there was more room. It was great. It was NEW, and in the 1960's NEW was wonderful. We had new and improved shampoo, new and improved cars, new and improved dog food, new and improved antacids and now we had new and improved Masses. It was not long before vestments and rubrics went the way of the dodo. Words were changed and we were consecrating bagels and Ripple. If hierarchy, sacred leadership, was important in old, the new seemed to be neither sacred nor led by anyone. We were desensitized to the need for leadership, sacred or otherwise. This is the same era in which 18 year-olds believing that this indeed was the Age of Aquarius, took to the streets to attack the evils of society. It was the time of the sexual revolution and the drug culture. Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!  Well, we certainly tore down the walls, but we had nothing with which to replace them. The sexual revolution gave way to epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases and the culture of divorce. The drugs gave way to burnout and worst of all rock n’ roll gave way to disco and polyester pants suits. Talk about societal decline.

This was also the era in which TV sit-coms like “Father Knows Best” gave way to shows that could have been titled “Father Is An Idiot”. The correlation between the demise of the Mass and the demise of fatherhood is not too farfetched. Don’t forget that Catholic Priests were called Father. Priests everywhere stared to shy away from their titles. You might say, “Hello, Father,” only to be met with “Oh, I’m not your Father, just call me Pete.” That was how you showed you were a cool priest — that and wearing blue jeans instead of dreary black. It didn’t mean you were cool. It just meant you weren’t sure what you were doing with your life.

You were no longer a man who was called and ordained to intercede for the people of God in imitation of Christ, so what were you — sort of a life-coach or a Saul Alinsky community organizer?  We were anti-clerical clerics and were supposed to be close to the people. Some of us got close to people in a very unfortunate way and I needn’t go into that. I will just quote an old Lithuanian priest who shook his head when they removed the confession screens. “They’re going to find out pretty quickly why they put in the confessional screens in the first place.”

The world threw out sacred leadership and in the “spirit of Vatican II”, we joined in the party. The TV shows went from “I Remember Mama” and “Father Knows Best” to “Maude,” a show that celebrated divorce and geriatric promiscuity. It was an overnight transition. The Catholic prohibitions against promiscuity, artificial birth control and divorce became laughable. The Catholic prohibitions against abortion and same-sex relationships became crimes against tolerance and are fast becoming crimes against humanity.

What has this to do with human sacrifice?  In Deuteronomy 12:31 we read, “You must not worship the Lord your God in their (the Canaanites’) way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.”

In our county we worship the twin deities, Freedom and Prosperity. Why do you think babies are snatched from the womb? Either for the sake Freedom or Prosperity.  And what do you think they do with those babies? They are thrown out and from there either go into landfills or into incinerators, just like Jews in the Holocaust.

Burn ‘em or bury ‘em. Just get rid of them. There was a shrine in the Valley of Gehenna called Tophet or the Roasting Place. There was set up an idol of the god Molech. According to the medieval Jewish sage Rashi, “Moloch was an idol made of brass. They heated him from his lower parts and his hands being stretched out, and made hot, they put the child between his hands, and it was burnt; when it vehemently cried out; but the priests beat a drum, that the father might not hear the voice of his son, and his heart might not be moved.” 

The drums beat, the doctor recommends, the paper work is filled out, the insurance pays, so that our hearts might not be moved. The Early Christians as well as the Jews believed that Moloch was no god, but a demon — the very personification of evil. So we seem still to be throwing our children into the fire, or into the landfill. It really makes no difference. It is all for the worship of the gods Prosperity and Freedom.

There is no father to weep for his children, no father to protect his wife, no Father in the pulpit to speak for God, no father in the home to teach his children. We may do as we please because nothing from the liturgy to human life is sacred.

Next week: I’m far from done.

Sex, the Devil and the Second Vatican Council

Sex, the Devil and the Second Vatican Council, Letter to Mary K. Lastima continued:

When last I wrote, Mary Kay, I quoted the Venerable Paul VI’s words: “…from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God. There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation.” 

The Venerable Paul goes on to say:

“There was the belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the Church.  Instead, it is the arrival of a day of clouds, of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty. We preach ecumenism but we constantly separate ourselves from others. We seek to dig abysses instead of filling them in. How has this come about? The Pope entrusts one of his thoughts to those who are present: that there has been an intervention of an adverse power. Its name is the devil, this mysterious being that the Letter of St. Peter also alludes to. So many times, furthermore, in the Gospel, on the lips of Christ himself, the mention of this enemy of men returns. ....We believe in something that is preternatural that has come into the world precisely to disturb, to suffocate the fruits of the Ecumenical Council, and to impede the Church from breaking into the hymn of joy at having renewed in fullness its awareness of itself.”

The Vatican Council was most certainly inspired by the Holy Spirit, but at least in the estimation of Pope Paul VI, the so called “Spirit of Vatican II" was more like the ghost of Christmas past, or some other specter that goes bump in the night. I remember the craziness well.

I spent many years in a parish of interesting ethnicity. The liturgical music that flourished after the council in the out of the way country whence came my parishioners was mostly in the form of a tango or military march music. I suspect that if the council fathers had heard the tango at communion, they would have ended the council, packed their backs and gone home quickly and quietly. The same parish also had a large Spanish speaking component. Some liturgical genius adapted a 1971 Budweiser beer commercial for Eucharistic use. It was a very catchy melody, “When you say Bud, you’ve said a lot of things nobody else can say....” The banality that afflicted the liturgy immediately following the council was stupefying. From stupefying it went to horrifying. I cannot count the invalid Masses at which I failed to receive communion in my seminary training. From bagels and Mogen David we move on to matzoh and fortified Port and occasionally Coca-Cola. Non-Masses were offered on coffee tables amidst the detritus of college dorm rooms. The modern liturgy crowd has become more sophisticated but no less banal with giant paper mâché head liturgical dancing and circus style enthronements of the Scriptures. This was not what the council was about, but it is what the council means to most people who have never bothered to read the documents.

Can you say “rubric”? I knew you could!  A rubric is a decorative text or instruction in medieval documents that were written in red ink to distinguish them from the text to be read or spoken. They were like medieval parentheses. In the Roman Missal, or Mass Book, the words to be said are in black and the actions to be done are in red, hence “rubrics” as in “ruby red”. Here is a rubric from the Roman Missal: 127.

The priest, turned toward the people, extending and joining his hands, adds: The peace of the Lord be with you always.

There are seven or eight other rubrics like it. In other words the Roman Missal currently in use assumes that the priest is facing away from the congregation in certain parts of the Mass.

“No, that can’t be! The council directed that the Mass be said facing the people.” 

No, it didn’t. The thespian interests and preferences of people like Rembert Weakland dictated that the Mass be radically different. When people are suddenly and completely yanked away from what they have known for a lifetime, they are much more malleable, much more controllable. To alienate people from the things with which they are comfortable is a kind of “grooming behavior”. If you want to manipulate someone it is helpful to take away their sources of stability. For purposes of their own, Rembert Weakland and a few others alienated as much of the church as they could from the kind of liturgy that had sustained the culture and morality of Catholicism for more than a thousand years.

The Mass of Paul VI is a simple and elegant adaptation of the Catholic liturgy. It was not meant to look that different from the Mass of the 20 preceding centuries. It was meant to be more approachable and more easily understood by the faithful. The aberrant way in which the Mass came to be said by a group of people who seemed to hate their history was taken to be the dictate of the council, and as the Mass changed, so too did the sense of obedience and morality that are the hallmarks of Catholic faith. Just after the Vatican Council, Tom Lehrer, a Harvard math teacher and comedian wrote a song called “Vatican Rag”, using the melody of an old ragtime tune, “Spaghetti Rag”. Here are some of the words of Mr. Lehrer’s song:

First you get down on your knees, 

Fiddle with your rosaries,

Bow your head with great respect,

And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if

you have cleared them with the Pontiff.

Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison,

Doin' the Vatican Rag.

“Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison.” That pretty much summed up the heady days following the Council. If a priest could make up his own Mass, the faithful could certainly make up their own rules, and when in 1968 Paul VI published Humanae Vitae reaffirming Church opposition to artificial birth control, the faithful, led by the clergy just laughed at him. Paul VI warned us of the consequences of widespread artificial birth control:

1.         A general lowering of moral standards throughout society;

2.         A rise in infidelity;

3.         A lessening of respect for women by men; and

4.         Tthe coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

It seems that the Venerable Paul was a prophet. Just ask the Chinese who need government permission to have a child. The European era seems to be drawing to a close. Europeans and their colonial relatives have a reproduction rate of about 1.60 children per woman. The rate needed to insure the existence of a nation or people is 2.1. Catholics in Latin America, Asia and Africa are still having children, and in the words of the historian Will Durant, the fertile will inherit the earth. Europe laughed at Paul VI and now can’t find enough children to sustain its own economy, or even existence for that matter. The misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council has been profoundly demonic in its effects.

Yes, demonic.

Liturgical chaos spawned moral chaos, which in turn spawned abortion, infanticide and abortive artificial birth control, and — you see — the devil hates babies.

Next week: Human sacrifice makes a comeback 

Isn't it great that Pope Francis is letting us vote on truth?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all, 

I think it’s so exciting that Pope Francis has asked us all to vote on what we think of gay marriage and remarriage and artificial birth control and living together before marriage and all that sort of thing. Personally, if you want to know what I think, the Church needs “to wake up and smell the coffee” on cohabitation. It is commonplace and there are some reasons for it which cannot be summarily dismissed, such as economic realities. On the matter of artificial contraception my responses might be characterized by the saying, “that train left the station long ago”. Catholics have made up their minds and the sensus fidelium suggests the rejection of Church teaching on this subject. What do you think?

Yours sincerely,

Mary Kay Lastima

Dear Ms. Lastima,

I think you are nuts. First of all, I doubt that the Roman Pontiff, Pope Francis, the Bishop of Rome has suddenly become a Congregationalist who wants us to vote on the truth. Second of all, you seem to have no understanding, or perhaps a convenient modern American understanding of the “Sensus Fidelium”. 

The Sensus Fidelium (sense of the faithful) is the understanding held by the whole body of the faithful. It is “the supernatural appreciation of faith on the part of the whole people, when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 92) Lumen Gentium, a document of the Second Vatican Council says: “By this appreciation of the faith, aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth, the People of God, guided by the sacred teaching authority... receives... the faith, once for all delivered to the saints... the People unfailingly adheres to this faith, penetrates it more deeply with right judgment, and applies it more fully in daily life.”

It is important to note that the Sensus Fidelium is not a vote, not a two thirds majority, and it is led by the teaching authority of the Church. By that it is meant, I assume, the bishops of the Universal Church especially the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ. It is not the faithful leading the bishops. The call of the bishops is to lead the faithful.

The Sensus Fidelium is an expression of the whole Church, spread out through space and time. It does not just belong to the modern American/European Church which is careening toward extinction. It belongs to the whole Church, including Africans, Asian, (especially Vietnamese, Korean, Filipinos), and Mexicans and other Latin’s, these are people who still seem to love their children more than they love their poodles and their large flat screen TVs. The Sensus Fidelium includes the faithful of two thousand years, not just the faithful born since the sixties. The Sensus Fidelium is the authentic sense of what we have held and believed universally and consistently since the beginning. It is not the church catching up with the latest trends or coming to terms with day time talk TV show on which over-the-hill actresses grace us with their personal infallibility and superior acumen.

For instance, we have always believed that abortion is wrong. The Bible doesn't even mention abortion as far as I can tell. I don’t recall any pope having to make infallible pronouncements about abortion, but from the Fathers of the Church until now, we have always known that abortion is just wrong. That is the Sensus Fidelium.

I am a bit bemused by your belief that the Church needs “…to wake up and smell the coffee” regarding cohabitation before marriage for economic reasons. In my limited pastoral experience a lot of couples who are (in the common phrase) “shacking up”, tell themselves and their grandparents that they are going to make it legal — eventually. They usually go through two or three cohabitations before they marry, (and then divorce). Which of the cohabitations are we to condone as a legitimate source of grace? The first, the second or the third?  If by “economic reasons” you mean the expense of the big white wedding at 40,000 smackers, you have as little regard for the permanence and sanctity of marriage as most marriage planners and divorce lawyers. For them multiple marriage is a boon. They get to fleece the same people over and over. I suggest you go to your computer and look up “Cohabitor’s vows” on YouTube. And now the big one: ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL. In essence you are equating the Sensus Fidelium with the saying, “If everybody is doing it, it must be right.” I can imagine Germans said that to themselves in the stadium at Nuremberg as everyone raised their arms in a salute to Hitler. After all, everybody was doing it.

Traditionalist, restorationist, curmudgeonly, reactionary old uber-Catholic geezers like myself, often disparage Venerable Pope Paul VI. I do not. I think he was among the great hero’s of Christian history. None of us really know what overwhelming pressure he was under to cave in regarding two unchangeable points of Catholic Truth. By these I mean the sacrificial nature of the Mass and the unbreakable bond between the unitive and procreative elements of marriage. In English, these are the truths that the Catholic Mass is a true sacrifice, the re-presentation of Calvary, and that marriage is not just about a relationship, but that it is a relationship between a man and a woman that is open to the creation of new human life. No abortion and no artificial birth control. That poor little scholarly nebbish who occupied the throne of St. Peter from 1963 to 1978, the poor little sad sack who brought the Vatican Council to its close in 1965 is, in my opinion, one of the great popes of history. He was bullied by theologians, politicians, the press and by progressive liturgists and yet that frail, bookish fellow managed to cling to the essentials in the midst of a demonic hurricane. The Venerable Paul once said that “the smoke of Satan has entered the church.” One hears the quote but never the context. Here is a fuller version of his words. 

Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father (the Venerable Paul speaking of himself in the third person) affirms that he has a sense that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”  There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him and ask him if he has the formula of true life.  And we are not alert to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula of true life. Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light. Science exists to give us truths that do not separate from God, but make us seek him all the more and celebrate him. But they end up teaching us: “I don’t know, we don’t know, we cannot know.” The school becomes the gymnasium of confusion and sometimes of absurd contradictions. Progress is celebrated, only so that it can then be demolished with revolutions that are more radical and more strange, so as to negate everything that has been achieved, and to come away as primitives after having so exalted the advances of the modern world.

We certainly are seeing some strange things promoted by the prophets of journalism and social; change. It’s okay to kill the child in the womb. It’s okay to live a life that is just about the two of us and denies life and love to others, and we should all be supportive of the distasteful and brutally primitive tastes of certain sexual minorities, which are as good as and as respectable as the natural intimacy between a man and woman that creates that most beautiful of creatures, the human infant. These are strange inversions indeed and certainly seem to fall under the rubric of “revolutions that are more radical and more strange.”

Next Week: Sex, the Devil and the Second Vatican Council 

(I bet you’ll read that one!)

Do I need to confess sins for which I have no remorse?

Dear Reverend Know-It-All,

I was born into the Catholic faith and have faithfully attended Mass and participated in my church choir since I was old enough to do so. However, in the past two years or so, I consciously avoided the sacrament of reconciliation. This is due to sins I have committed which I do not feel sorry for. I realize that this is something I need to work through, but in the meantime, am I allowed to go to confession if I omit the sins I feel no remorse for? If not, does this have any effect on whether or not I am allowed to receive communion?

 N. Repenter

Dear Mr. Repenter,

Your letter makes me very sad. You are clearly troubled by the situation and are obviously sincere. First let me comment on your having been born Catholic. No one is born Catholic. We are baptized Catholic. Baptism is a sacrament, a word which comes to us from the Latin word “oath to the death”. When you receive a sacrament you are swearing the most solemn oath possible to be faithful to someone, in this case to Christ who loves you. Every time we go to Holy Communion we renew our Baptismal vows and give our life to Christ. It seems that there is part of yourself that you are withholding from the Lord.

I am sad also that you are avoiding confession because you don’t feel remorse. Feelings are not always the best indicators of repentance. Are you saying, “God, you are wrong. These things are not sins.”? Or perhaps you are saying, “God doesn’t mind these things. It’s the Church who says this, not God.” I don’t know your particular situation, but let’s go with second or third marriages. What’s wrong with them? They are certainly less desirable than one loving and stable marriage that lasts a lifetime, but these days hardly anybody has that. The Church should catch up with the times. Do the old men in Rome expect me to live alone and bitter like they do?  It’s not the old men in Rome who decide these things. I find that every time I disagree with God, it turns out that God is right and I am wrong. It seems that God has this problem; He thinks He is God, and the better part of my life has been an attempt on His part to convince me that He is God and I am not!

When I disagree with the Church on a moral issue, if I look at it closely, it isn’t the Church saying that something like second/third/forth marriage is wrong, it’s the Holy Spirit speaking in the New Testament. If I believe that the New Testament is the speaking of the Holy Spirit and that it is the story of the New Covenant into which I am baptized, and which I renew in Confession and Holy Communion, I am not just arguing with the Church, but with the Holy Spirit who wrote the book through the weak and sinful hands of people like St. Peter and St. Paul.  

I am saddest of all to read your letter, because it reminds me of something that happened in the life of my dear sister who died when she was still a young woman. Through her suffering I learned what repentance really is. If you don’t regret these things now, someday you will regret them very much. My sister was a wonderful Christian woman and we were very close to each other, though she was a few years older than I. She moved to California and had a family. I would spend my vacations there with her and family. She was very involved in the faith and a great champion of the rights of children in the womb at the very beginning of the pro-life movement. However, she had been the most adventurous of all my siblings, and when she was very young she took up smoking as part of her exciting social life. She became a very heavy smoker and no one could convince her that it was wrong. Of course she developed lung cancer in her mid forties. I went out to visit her on the very day that she got the doctor’s call telling that she had terminal lung cancer. I walked in the door, and as I put down my suitcase, she looked up at me and, cigarette in hand, said “I have killed myself.” Then she looked at the cigarette in her fingers with a look that I will never forget. It was a glance of hatred and disgust, I think for herself as much as for the cigarette. She had learned too late that the advice she had always disregarded  was right. A few months later I returned to offer her funeral Mass.

When I returned home, being a smoker of cigars myself, I sat in my old overstuffed armchair and prepared to light up a cigar. Out of respect for my grieving family I had not smoked while I was in California for the funeral, but now I was looking forward to an enjoyable few moments, lost in curling blue smoke. I picked up the cigar and a match, but then I looked at the cigar with the same revulsion that had darkened my sister’s dying face as she looked at her last cigarette. I thought, “This is the stupidest thing I can possibly do. I am paying some large tobacco corporation for the privilege of a slow, painful death. I put the cigar down, and haven’t picked one up again in almost 40 years. I had repented. I had been given and had accepted the gift of seeing something as God really sees it, not just as I wanted to see it. The New Testament word for repentance is “metanoia”. It doesn’t mean try harder, or change your life. It means change your understanding. Better, it means allow God’s Holy Spirit to change your understanding. 

The Bible says, “Do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” (Romans 12:2). Understanding precedes and determines action. If I know that the bridge is out, I will take another road, unless of course I am thick headed and say, “I was just here yesterday, the bridge is fine and I am in a hurry.” I will end up in the river with that attitude, because I have refused to accept truth. I can always refuse to believe when I am given good advice, and frankly I usually do refuse good advice because I want what I want. To repent is to accept the advice of someone we love and trust. That someone is Christ. We may not understand it now, but He tells us these things because He loves us, not because He wants to make us unhappy.

It is not possible to break the laws of physics. If I go to a cliff, saying “I will now break the law of gravity,” and I step off the cliff in about 10 seconds I will find out that I could not break the law of gravity. It is just as impossible to break the Law of God. You can’t lie. It’s not possible. If I tell my boss I am sick when I am really going to the beach, there is always the possibility that someone from my job will see me, and even if I get away with the lie, I will have no peace because  I may be found out, what with security cameras, etc. everywhere. I may have been to the beach, but my mind was elsewhere all the time. It is impossible to commit adultery. You will never find the love and security you seek outside a committed, permanent relationship. An affair may be enjoyable, but I have never known one that doesn’t end in disappointment and heartbreak. You can’t steal. I have known a lot of thieves in my life, but I have never known a rich one. Even if they appear to have succeeded, they live in constant fear of detection.

You really can’t break the Law of God. The commandments are not arbitrary rules made by men. They are the inevitable and inflexible laws of the human condition. In His love, the Almighty has revealed them to us. It is like the parent who says to a child, “Be careful, dear, the stove is hot. Don’t touch. The child cannot resist touching the stove, simply because it’s forbidden. The parent didn’t say, “don’t touch,” just to be mean. Perhaps the commandments should be called the Ten Warnings. They are given to us for our welfare by a God who made us and loves us.

I would suggest that you change the way you pray. The prayer of most people is “Lord, give me want I want.” The prayer of the believer is “Lord, teach me your ways”. If this is your sincere prayer, then I would say going to confession and communion will be the blessing they are meant to be.

I hope this helps a little,

The Rev. Know-it-all

Do Catholics worship idols?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I visited a Catholic church for the first time the other day and frankly I was shocked. There were a lot of graven images in the church and there was some procession going on during which one of these graven images was being carried about. Isn’t this sort of thing expressly forbidden in the Bible?

Sincerely,

Ida L. Carver

Dear Ida,

At first reading it would seem you are right. Here are two texts from the Scriptures. First Exodus 20:4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

And Isaiah 45:20 “Gather yourselves and come; Draw near together, you fugitives of the nations; they have no knowledge, who carry about their wooden idol And pray to a god who cannot save.”

It would seem that religious imagery is expressly forbidden in the Bible, but think again. The Temple, had images of angels, lions, flowers, fruit and trees as did the Dwelling in the desert (see Exodus 25, 26 and 37, and First Kings 7 and 10). Moses was commanded by God to make an image of a bronze serpent (Numbers 21:4) which was kept in the Temple until people started to worship it. (2Kings18:4)

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture which was written in Egypt around 200 BC. Like all translations, it provides a kind of commentary on the meaning of words. There are two words used in the commandment against idols: “Pesel” and “Tehmunah.” Pesel means a carving and Tehmunah means a likeness. Pesel is the common word for an idol, a “carving”. Tehmunah is a more general word. The next verse in the text forbids the bowing to and the serving of such things.  It would seem that such images and carvings are forbidden as objects of worship.  In the Greek Septuagint “Pesel” is translated “idolon”, or idol. “Tehmunah” is translated “icon” or image. The stricture against idols is absolute. But it seems that the use of icons is allowed in the proper context.

The closest that an iconoclast (anti-image) non-Catholic Christian can have to such things would be figures in a Christmas Crib. Most Christians who forbid images have no problem with Christmas figures and are insulted when some small town dictator forbids setting one up in the public square in our current drive for freedom from religion.  No Protestant I know looks at an image of the Baby Jesus in a Christmas display with anything but tenderness. They don’t worship it. It is merely a help to memory, a representation of something loved and revered. If one interprets the ban on carvings and images with rigorous literacy, even photography is forbidden. The only people I know who go that far are the Amish. In the scripture itself images are clearly allowed if they are not objects of worship. Well isn’t worship what Catholics are doing when they have their processions etc.? Not any Catholics I know.

First of all most of the images are those of saints, especially Mary, the Blessed Mother of Our Lord. Saints are not gods. No Catholic I know regards a bit of plaster or a hunk of wood as in any way divine. They are representational art meant to remind us of the Communion of Saints and the Presence of Heaven in our midst. I have never said to a hunk of plaster, “Deliver me; for you are my god,” (Isaiah 44:17) not even to the plastic Jesus riding on the dash board of my car. Religious images as means of instruction, as a means of lifting the heart and the mind to God in prayer are perfectly acceptable biblically as we see from the decoration of the temple. When the thing becomes the object of prayer, or is thought to have some sort of power in itself, like the Bronze Serpent in the time of Hezekiah, it ceases to be legitimate.

Catholics have a great antidote to idolatry: the Holy Eucharist. If you had a picture of your mother that meant a lot to you, you might gaze at it fondly. If, however your mother came into the room, would you continue to stare at the picture and neglect the real flesh and blood woman? No, you would put the picture away and embrace the actual person.

We Catholics believe that the Holy Eucharist, which for all the world appears to be a piece of bread, is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. We enjoy religious art, but we don’t believe that those images are God. How could we? We have God himself living in the tabernacles of our churches.

I was at that procession you saw. Did anyone drop to their knees when the image of the Holy Child passed by? No, they didn’t because it was only an image. A little later in the Mass a small bell rang and the whole congregation dropped to its knees and I said the words, “This is my Body and this is my Blood,” over a piece of bread and a sip of wine. For this the whole congregation knelt because this was God appearing in visible form on the altar through the words and hands of a sinner like me. It was infinitely more than a colorful bit of plaster.

I imagine you think it even more absurd to worship a piece of bread. Better to worship the bit of plaster! Oh, but you don’t understand that is not simply bread, it is the Bread come down from heaven, it is the Lord Jesus who commanded us to eat His flesh and drink His Blood. I invite you to look up the Eucharistic Miracle of Buenos Aires on YouTube, or to get the book “Unseen” by Ron Tesoriero and Lee Han. We are not idolaters because we bend the knee only to the Lord. You may think that we bend the knee to a statue or even a piece of Bread, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

There is another kind of idolatry much more pernicious than the religious art that you so look down on. It is a particularly modern kind of idolatry. How often have you heard someone say, “I cannot believe in a god who would allow the Holocaust or who would forbid me to marry whomever I will and as often as I will. I cannot believe in a god who will not give what I want or who allows human suffering. I refuse to believe in a god who is father and not mother.” Perhaps most challenging is to believe in the God of the Old Testament who ordered the slaughter of every individual of the seven Canaanite nations (Deut. 20:16, 17) “Completely destroy them, the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.”

I hear you say, “How could God demand this? Such a god would be evil!” At the same time I have heard people say that they could not believe in a god who would forgive a Stalin or a Hitler. Have you become the judge of God? Will you forbid God his infinite Justice and Mercy? Will you make a god to your own specification? Will you carve out a god who takes his orders from you? It is an idolatry far worse than a statue or picture. It is a cancer of the heart and mind that deforms the image of God which was forged in the human person at the dawn of time.

Be very careful of accusing others of idolatry when you carry false gods in your heart and mind.  By the way, the abominations that merited the utter destruction of the seven nations, was the ritual sacrifice of children. These are the only nations in history whose extinction God commanded. It seems that the murder of children for economic well being is cause for Heaven’s greatest wrath. As an American, I am just a little afraid that God really does order the destruction of whole nations for certain crimes, especially those against children.

Yours nervously,

Rev. Know-it-all

Of butterflies and monsters -- part 2

Letter to Ms. Ann Salting continued

Clericalism is as dead as yesterday’s road kill, at least the clericalism to which we are accustomed. By clericalism, I mean an elite class who arrogate to themselves the decisions of other men’s souls. There will always be such classes, I fear, but they change. Today’s servants become masters tomorrow.

I don’t think that the sense of the diocesan priest as a member of class apart is easy to find, at least among diocesan priests. Priests are pretty much a despised class at the present. Not long ago if, after hours, you called our diocesan center here in Frostbite Falls, you heard a recorded message that gave you two numbers: one to call if you suspected your priest of hanky-panky and the other if you suspected your priest of financial skullduggery. There are swarms of lawyers, supervisors, auditors etc. milling about to make sure that nothing untoward is going on in the lives of the clergy. It’s really hard to form a cabalistic elite when you are constantly filling out forms to make sure that you are on the up and up.

Diocesan priests are certainly not a power elite these days. We are answerable to financial auditors, performance review auditors, compliance auditors, vicars, deans, agency heads, and if all else fails, to the local bishop. I am not allowed to physically touch money, except for that which is clearly my own. I am responsible to raise the stuff, but I am never in actual physical proximity to the stuff for which I must regularly beat the bushes. The money is managed by non-ordained people, for which I am grateful, but it has gotten really tough to skim anything off the top these days. 

To form an elite it necessary to gather together to make the proper political connections. Schmooze is an absolute necessity to a clerical system. I remember the good old days of clericalism especially the dinners — jumbo shrimp and an open bar. Sometime during the early 80's things shifted from jumbo shrimp and martini’s to trail mix and diet soda. I knew then that the good old days of clericalism were over. We no longer go to grand gatherings of the clergy. We go to meetings; coffee, cookies and an agenda. And if there is a dinner, one has to leave early because there is always an appointment back at the rectory. Who has time to schmooze? There is always some emergency that is more important than getting together with one’s confreres.

The acquisition of status, power and wealth is the purpose of clericalism. There is certainly not much status and not much power or wealth to acquire anymore, and who has the time to acquire it? There is too much work waiting back at the parish. I don’t want power status or wealth. I just want a good night’s sleep most of the time.

This is not to say that the mushroom of clericalism is dead. It has just begun to emerge in other dark, moist corners. In times past, one could find ambitious clergymen in diocesan bureaucracies. Now the downtown offices are full of non-ordained people some of whom are saints and servants. Priests have a very limited tenure in their assignments. These days the usual maximum for a pastoral assignment is 12 years. Then a pastor must move. It is “better’ for the priest and “better” for the parish. One would not want a priest to get stale, or to create his own little kingdom.

In times past, a pastoral assignment was expected to be for life and Father would usually be taken out of the rectory feet first, to the sorrow of some and the rejoicing of others.  Now, a pastor must submit his resignation at the age of 70. There is a swell party and then Father is shown door and wished good luck. In our diocese there is a generous pension of about a thousand a month. Ah, the power and status of the clergy! 

As I mentioned above, there is a class of people in the diocese who do not have a necessary retirement age. They are the dedicated servants of the diocesan agencies. They usually work just down the hall from the bishop and they are his close collaborators. I am sure that they will learn from the mistakes of the presbyterate and will avoid ambition and careerism. I know that they are incapable of financial or amorous wrongdoing, because they are lay people. 

The Vatican is working to achieve greater transparency and efficiency, the very opposite of clericalism, by hiring top flight professional companies to assist in its work, which companies also I’m sure are incapable of wrongdoing, because they, too, are lay people. The Vatican has tapped the consulting firm of Ernst & Young (motto: building a better working world) to provide business advice. McKinsey & Company will help manage the Osservatore Romano, Vatican Radio, and Vatican Television. The Swiss accounting firm KPMG will help modernize the Vatican’s finances. This should be interesting. 

I love obscure history. Don’t you? Did you know that the first bishop elected pope, that is the bishop of Rome, was Marinus the First? He was elected pope in 882. Formerly, he had been the bishop of Caere, in effect an auxiliary bishop of Rome. This caused huge scandal. Popes were generally taken from among the deacons and sometime the presbyters of Rome. A bishop was never named pope. A bishop never transferred from one diocese to another.

A bishop wears a ring, I have been told, because he is married to his diocese. For a bishop to change diocese was tantamount to adultery, or so the first millennium of Christians believed. Marinus managed to hold on to the job of Pope for about a year and a half. 

After him they chose a saint, St. Adrian, then a priest of Rome. After him, Stephen V seems to have done a decent job for a few years, but then the church sank into a quagmire that made the Borgias look tame. The papacy became the play thing of the powerful families of Italy whose sons had already risen to high clerical office. It soon became the rule to elect a bishop and they elected some doozies. Pope Formosus (891-896) seems to have been a decent enough fellow, but got entangled in politics and then it was a free for all. Formosus was succeeded by Boniface VI who mysteriously managed to live only for about two weeks. He was succeeded by Stephen VI who was friends with the politicians that Formosus had offended, so Formosus’ corpse was dug up, put on trial, stripped of the papal vestments and thrown in the river. I am not making this up. It just gets worse. 

The Lord in His mercy eventually reformed things, but the precedent had been set. A bishop clearly had power not only in the church but in the world and the politics of Europe. The papacy were inextricably bound up with European politics until fairly recently. Considering what was at stake, we Catholics can be very proud of the fact that relatively few popes were corrupt. In our time we have had a string of amazingly holy popes. May it always be so. 

This great shift in the nature of the episcopacy meant that the bishops of Europe had a lot to do with who ruled Europe. There was power, wealth and status to be had, and there were second sons of the nobility who looked at the church as reasonable and lucrative career choice, since they could not inherit the titles that went to their older brothers. In fact, in 1462 my ancestral home town in Lower-Upper Hessia backed the wrong candidate for bishop in a shooting war between Bishop Dieter of Isenberg and Bishop of Adolf of Nassau as to who would be the Archbishop of Mainz. You see, the Archbishop of Mainz got to vote for the Emperor. Both Dieter and Adolf wanted to trade up. There are three cannonballs enshrined in the wall of our village church to commemorate the siege by Bishop Adolf. Now these things are no longer done with cannons. Meetings are the more appropriate battle field. Ah, good times! 

I write all these complaints simply to say that perhaps the presbyterate isn’t the group to worry about at the moment. There are other areas of church governance that  still come with some wealth power and status, and I hope that involving non-religious secular financial institutions in the governance of the church is a good idea. It didn’t work so well in the middle ages, but maybe things are better now. I have to go now. I have a meeting and a dinner, but I can’t stay for the dinner because I have a confirmation class and then a bible class. 

Rev. Know-it-all