Note: As regular readers of this blog may know (and apologies for the fewer and fewer posts), I* have been wrestling with deciding whether to stay in the Holy Catholic Church or to leave her. The struggle may be over.
Mr Beeler has it right. No. Simply no.
Meanwhile, the Pope is at it again, bashing his critics.
Francis, the world’s first Latin American pope, also took the opportunity to lash out at clerical conservatives who have been criticizing him over a variety of issues since the passing of Benedict XVI. ‘His death has been instrumentalized [sic] by people who want to bring water to their own mill,’ he said, using an Italian expression that means to profit at the expense of others. ‘The people who exploit such a good person, a Holy Father of God… These people have no ethics, they are party people, not Church people.’ (Italics added.)
Francis has been making it increasingly clear lately how deeply he despises those Catholics who prefer worshiping in the manner established in 1570 at the Council of Trent, and which has roots going back many centuries earlier. He and most of the brass currently occupying the Vatican want to, essentially, rasa the tabula by not only dumbing down the mass even further and banning again its celebration in Latin, thus forcing the use of inelegant translations into the vernacular, but also scrapping much of the accompanying dignified rituals that enhance worship.
In short, Pope Francis and his reformist colleagues’s missions seem to be transforming the Catholic Church into something resembling Episcopal Church-Lite with contemporary aesthetics like do-it-yourself liturgy and complete disdain for silly rules, such as those dictating by whom the host should be distributed (see photo above), their argument being along the lines: “those rules and others are oppressive to women, never mind they recreate biblical history.”
Alas, I cannot bear any longer watching Holy Church’s downward race to banality and blandness. Worship should be elaborate, beautiful, and awesome (in the proper sense of that last word, not California surfer-speak). A church of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, whose Divine Liturgies I have been attending lately, offers those things. And while I do not agree with certain Orthodox positions clashing with those of the Catholic Church, for now, we will simply have to agree to disagree. Not very satisfactory I know, but it’s the best I can manage at present. Please pray for this sinner.
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*I have decided to drop use of the third-person. It’s just too cumbersome.
THE TAOS TATLER. 