Like the Mormons. But not.
I really have an issue with the USCCB’s pro-marriage ad campaign. Stable marriages are important to the Church and to society, but the issue is a lot more complex than the ads would have you think.
The real problem is the timing, though. One blog that regularly annoys me with anti-Catholic bile had an entry about it (linked) which, under the bile, has a point. There must be better uses for that money that won’t set the Church up for more ridicule at a time when stories in the news are not really helping our worldwide profile.
Fulfilling my obligation
My license to write a Catholic blog will be yanked if I don’t write something about the upcoming motu proprio, I think.
I make no secret of the fact that I am, by orthodox Catholic standards, a political liberal. I’ve taken a harder line on some things as I get older, but I’ll always have my particular mix of liberal/libertarian beliefs.
So I enjoy Commonweal and its blog. During the countdown to the motu proprio, though, I’m coming to realize that my politics and my liturgical conservatism don’t mix very well. I should have known this all along…but a blog post about the MP turned into a rather amusing moonbat commentfest. (And I say this as someone who was somewhere between “lapsed” and “dissident” Catholic in 2005 and really disappointed at Benedict XVI’s election. At the time!) Then there was another post with much saner comments. The fear and scorn from many commenters is strange. The goal here isn’t to re-impose the Tridentine Mass on everyone, people! It’s to allow people who want to celebrate it to do so without depending on the whims of their bishops.
I haven’t been feeling well lately and haven’t the energy for any writing I’m not getting paid for. Instead, here’s a selection of comments from the dotCommonweal post. It was rather enlightening to see a more liberal perspective on this than what I’m used to reading online. It’s good for me to get out of my particular media ghetto, I guess.
I ask this seriously - can any of those favouring the older Latin Mass explain why they prefer a Mass said in a language they can’t understand.
If one needs to know Latin to be “better custodians of the mysteries ….” (whatever THAT is supposed to mean!) then one is simply interjecting an element of Gnosticism into the picture. It smacks of “secret knowledge” available only to the initiates.
Are you saying that non-Latin speakers are lesser classes when it comes to “the mysteries?” A loose parallel in your country would be saying that an Oxbridge accent is more English than all others.
I find it strange that Jesus, the gospel and epistle writers, and the early church fathers didn’t need a special language (sans secret decoder ring, of course) in order to preach, teach and sanctify.
My point about the situation at the NDC with the LC imposition of Latin into the English language Mass was that the good little sheep of yesteryear are, in the main, gone from the picture. Most contemporary Catholics no longer roll over and play dead just because Father Says So. And so it shall be once the motu proprio is fully implemented and some eager-beaver priest tries to impose a Latin mass in a parish where it is not wanted.Diversity, nonsense. Such talk is either naive or a cynical attempt to hijack the language of the reform for the purpose of defeating it. What the proponents of the use of the 1962 liturgy are after is the suppression of the Mass of Paul VI. Read their literature, and it becomes plain. I suspect the next move will be to train all priests in both rites, so the move can easily be made later to a complete change back to the so-called Tridentine rite.
As far as Bishop Elliot is concerned I am really flabbergasted. What is he talking about? Of course mystification has always served the hierarchy well in that they would have to answer to no one.
Along with Humanae Vitae, the church’s stand on divorce and annulment, and contempt of women, people will ignore Rome and attend services and hope the clergy will come out of their wilderness.
I saved the worst of the bunch for last:
What we are witnessing vis-a-vis the upcoming motu proprio is the last gasp of a fearful and pitiful old man occupying the chair of Peter. Kinda’ sad, when one thinks of it.
My jaw dropped.
Yes. We here in upstate New York are having demographic shifts and a worsening priest shortage. Yes, every diocese up has here made the difficult decision to close and merge parishes as needed, based on those demographic shifts. (I belong to one such community, which has three parishes that share two church buildings linked under a single pastor.)
Buffalo is going through a period of closing and merging parishes according to shifts in the Catholic population. Historic ethnic parishes are closing. As a Catholic and lover of history, it makes me very sad.
But ethnic cleansing, it ain’t.
I wonder if this same politician had similar things to say when many branches of the Buffalo-Erie County Public Library, mostly in neighborhoods where people don’t own cars, closed a few years ago. Or was that different, because it was a difficult decision made in the face of a county fiscal crisis, instead of a difficult decision made in the face of a population, financial, and personnel crisis?
(H/T to CVSTOS FIDEI for the Catholic League link.)
Confession booths go silent
Today, the homily was about how important the sacrament of reconciliation is and how people don’t use it enough today. I wondered where this came from (after all, we had a few people in line who didn’t make it in to confession before mass started) and then I was skimming this morning’s newspaper and saw this article that ran in the paper today. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not…
The article will eventually be deleted, so I’ll quote out some of my favorite passages.
This scene in Albany speaks volumes about the state of confession in America. The sacrament, once a pillar of Catholic practice, is crumbling. And the way people confess, both what they say and where they say it, is shifting from the old laundry lists of minor misdeeds recited in austere anonymous boxes.Only 26 percent of Catholics go to confession at least once a year, according to a 2005 poll by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. A University of Notre Dame study in the early 1980s put the number at 74 percent.
It’s an alarming trend for Catholic leaders, who see confession as essential to spiritual health. What’s at stake is a route, laid out in the Bible, to examine your conscience, overcome sin and achieve grace.
Signs of concern keep popping up. Pope Benedict XVI talked up the sacrament in at least three recent public appearances, even casting it in modern psychological terms as a remedy for “guilt complexes.”
…
O’Toole also pointed to a new emphasis since the 1960s on the social dimensions of sin, the notion that sin isn’t so much “I punched my sister” as it is things like racism, sexism and damaging the environment. Stuff that’s generally harder to talk about in the confessional.
The professor added that rates of Communion skyrocketed after Vatican II in the 1960s, while rates of confession plummeted. Catholics, he said, got the idea that the Eucharist itself provided forgiveness. For minor sins, Doyle said, that’s true.
All of that is much more complicated than the simple reason one parishioner offered for why she prays every night but hasn’t confessed in at least 15 years.
“I feel like I don’t need somebody between me and God,” said Ginny Hartkern, 59, of St. Brigid’s Church in Watervliet. “I think you can speak directly to God. You don’t need an intermediary.”
…
So is there any bright spot in the Catholic confession landscape?
Yes. Several Catholic priests agreed that the few people who still use the sacrament are using it really well.
Today’s penitents are far more likely to talk about “sins of omission,” as Doyle put it. People might lament their failures to put in enough effort at work, say, or to be generous with their money or time.
The Rev. Paul Smith, sacramental minister at churches in Altamont and Berne, said parishioners now delve into things like bigotry — into the attitudes that underlie their misbehavior.
“They’re willing to go deeper,” he said.
Mixed blessings
I forgot to mention that on Sunday at the Tridentine Mass, there were a fair number of women with uncovered heads. Bad for the rite, but good in general. Why? Well, there were so many people that I think they ran out of loaner veils!
The indult parish is part of a group of three parishes (the Tridentine community is “non-territorial,” but the other two are regular urban parishes) together under one pastor, due to the dwindling number of practicing Catholics in the city, and the priest shortage. A wonderful priest in his eighties who is otherwise retired celebrates the Tridentine Mass, but the pastor has done it in the past.
For Sunday Masses, the indult Mass’s attendance is about 120, which is delightfully high for a service around here. People travel from three different states.
I love the aesthetic of it. Attending the cathedral’s long, solemn Novus Ordo Mass occasionally was a big step, and the catalyst of my reversion. It reminds me of what is special about being Catholic, as opposed to most mainstream parishes where the only glaring difference between that and Protestant services I’ve attended is that you don’t hear any female voices reading the Gospel.
Man, I’ve gone all rad-trad lately. I promise that I’ll be back to normal soon. I just finally absorbed how wonderful the old Mass is.
Demographic Changes
A few blogs have discussed parish (s)hopping recently.
I find this a tough problem for many reasons. It never occurred to me that it’s proper to attend one’s local church; we always drove across town because we felt more comfortable at the other one, which was in the same neighborhood as my school so I knew most of the kids my age in church.
I’ve been writing in my blog about my parish-shopping adventures. I live in a city where in my five-mile drive to the cathedral from where I used to live, I would literally drive past three Catholic churches, and bypass a half-dozen more a few blocks away that were closer to my apartment. I travel even farther to attend a Tridentine Mass. I enjoyed the more orthodox service and beautiful environment at the cathedral, and I don’t feel at home at any of the churches closer to me.
I believe that the idea of the “neighborhood parish” ended with demographic changes in America, at least. As Catholics migrate out to the suburbs (and the population in the areas surrounding many urban churches is no longer predominantly Catholic) this leaves us with a problem–if the urban parishes are unable to survive since their parishoners have all died or moved to the suburbs, do we shutter and sell those churches?
If that were the case, here in Albany we would have shut down the cathedral decades ago, since the construction of a government office plaza razed the predominantly Italian neighborhood of 7,000 people (not a typo) that formed part of its parish. These people dispersed, mostly out to the suburbs, and the Cathedral would not hold regular Masses if people (like me) didn’t commute in from other areas. You can also see a few smaller churches in that photo that were eminent domain’d out of existence. There were three torn down to build the Plaza.
Following the demographic shifts means closing older churches with history in favor of building very bland and modern churches in the suburbs. This is going on in upstate NY quite literally right now. The Syracuse diocese recently outlined its plans for closing and merging parishes, and reducing the number of priests needed to minister to the region’s faithful. Ogdensburg did the same thing recently. As one would expect, this involves closing or merging parishes in the cities or in rural areas. The Post-Standard explains:
The diocese is reorganizing to address a declining number of priests and population shifts from urban and rural communities to suburban communities. By 2010, fewer than 100 priests are expected to be able to minister full time in an area that now has 161 parishes and 14 missions.
Vocations are low, and the population is either shifting or leaving the area entirely. Plans in Central New York include closing smaller churches and building new, larger ones that will serve entire swaths of the rural areas that people like me have been fleeing.
The next generation in upstate NY will be difficult for all institutions, not just the Church. Young people simply don’t want to stay, and young people sustain the economy. And the parishes.
