IF I ONLY TOUCH THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT…

I must mention that the raising of the hem of the garment of the High Priest (symbolized by the lowly ordained priest chosen from the baptized laity, he is a layman first) always captured my religious imagination and I know why, "If I think to myself, if only I touch the outer garment of my Lord, I will be made whole!" As a disclaimer, my pastor in Augusta in the early 1960's was a stickler for the Mass of the Ages, the normative Mass at that time. The altar boys knew that the raising of the hem of the priest's chasuble was to be done in a conservative, moderate way, a kind of strecthing it and pulling is forward and upward in a most modest way. Our Savannah altar boys and men need to be reminded of my pastor's awareness of how to lift the hem of the Lord's garment for the congregation to symbolically touch and say to themselves, "If only I touch his outer garment, I will be made whole."

“… for she had been saying to herself, “If I only touch His outer robe, I will be healed.” (Matthew 9:21)

In an organic way and over the course of centuries, religious symbolism was added to very practical aspects of the Traditional Latin Mass. Overnight, most of that practical and religious symbolism was stripped from the Modern Mass and sadly so and to no real purpose as it does nothing to build the Catholic Liturgical Faith. 

I have already written about the Church’s “sign language” stripped from the Roman Canon as well as the so-called “Introductory Rites” of the Mass. 

But one symbolic gesture that always captured my imagination as a chid was the raising the hem of the priest’s outer garment (chasuble) during the elevations at the consecrations. 

I had never heard a really good religious reason or symbolic interpretation of what was more than likely a very practical aspect of this ritualized moment. 

And here it is from a passage found in the Gospels: “If I only touch His outer garment, I will be healed.”

That is powerful and completely lost in the Modern Mass.

Did you know that? 

AND WHEN IT IS DONE AT THE MASS YOU ATTEND, DO YOU SAY TO YOURSELF, IF ONLY I TOUCH HIS OUTER ROBE, I WILL BE HEALED?

HILTON HEAD’S ANNUAL LATERN LITURGY, NOT FOR THE RIGID THOUGH…

 

AT THE SERIOUS RISK OF COMING ACROSS AS RIGID, I POST, NOT IN ANY REAL ORDER, THE TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS.I CELEBRATED AT SAVANNAH’S SACRED HEART CHURCH AT 1 PM FOR THE 23RD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

 BUT TO ASSURE POPE FRANCIS, I DID CELEBRATE THE NORMATIVE MASS AT 60M IN BLUFFTON, SC WHICH HAD CONTEMPORARY MUSIC TO INCLUDE A SNARE DRUM OR TWO, BUT IT WAS REVERENT BUT NOT IN A RIGID SORT OF WAY, SO I AM PERFECTLY SANE EVERYONE ELSE IS CRASY…

I LIKE CATS, BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 Is this sacrilegious? For sale from the Bradford Exchange….

MELTDOWN IN FRANCE; IS IT THE ENTIRE CHURCH’S WATERLOO?

As was the case in this country with the never ending uncovering of the sex abuse of minors by clergy and then by bishops and then a prominent cardinal, now ex-cardinal and laicized priest, there were all the prophets of doom and gloom for the Church and her traditional structures. That has dissipated in our country but at its peak in France with revelations that make your skin crawl. 

But the Catholic Church, while universal, is most powerfully local. By that, I mean our diocesan and parish model. And I would say, the parish is the flashpoint of happiness or displeasure of Catholics, not the diocese and not the Universal Church.

If things are going well in the local parish, things are positive, the parish thrives and all is well with the Church and world. But if the parish and its leadership are a disaster, especially the pastor, well, “Rome we have a problem.”

No matter what safeguards the Church puts into place to protect minors and rank and file laity from predatory behavior of clerics or lay leaders in the Church, ultimately, we will never be perfect in that endeavor due to human weakness and psychological denial about serious crimes so-called good people commit. It is a psychological denial and many people in both high and low places in the Church, for their own sanity, enter into denial about these crimes or look the other way. And most of us fear breaking the 8th Commandment on harming the reputation of a person even if we suspect something is not right.

I think the key to restoring trust in the hierarchy and bishops, priests and religious has to do with screening of applicants for the priesthood and certainly professional screening of those the pope names as bishops and cardinals. I worry that Pope Francis is too compulsive in naming cardinals, there is little screening, and often the one named doesn’t know it until he sees his name in the press! That is outrageous to say the least. 

When I was vocation director for our diocese, I never took credit for those I recruited and eventually got ordained priests. But I did take credit for those we did not have as seminarians or who I was able to “weed out.”

In the 1970s, the standards for screening candidates for the priesthood were very lax and bishops accepted broken men, and broken in many ways, not just rigidity, thinking the seminary would be a therapeutic community to heal them and make them good priests. Even by the 80’s the seminaries were concerned about the candidates bishops were sending to them and expecting the seminary to be a therapeutic community for psychological healing of some serious disorders.

I would say that the vocations director and the bishop have a very serious obligation to screen out disordered candidates for the seminary. Simple questions posed to candidates about their sexual history can easily uncover if a candidate can or cannot live a celibate life. Promiscuity, be it heterosexual or homosexual is a red flag that the person will not be able to live celibate chastity in a healthy way. 

However, the greatest threat to seminary life and then parish life, is openness to accepting candidates who clearly identify as homosexual or worse yet, LGBTQ++++. The fact that Pope Francis has stated that he is no one to judge someone’s homosexual or LGBTQ+++ identity, is a return to the 1970’s and the thought that gay men in an all male seminary that is lax about personal friendships and red flags in that regard, is not problematic or a scandal. It bodes ill for future parish life and any kind of real recovery from the sex abuse scandal we continue to experience here and around the world. 

IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK TO RE-RITUALIZE THE MODERN MASS WITH THE SAME SIGN LANGUAGE AS THE TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS HAS?

The video above shows a woman signing the Eucharistic Prayer (#3) as the priest prays it. I am not sure this is an actual Mass or not, or a simulation for “signing” purposes. Please note the consecration of the bread. The bread isn’t shown. But please note the ritualization of language through the person who is signing. I would have preferred the priest doing this rather than someone to his side. 

None the less, this video reminds me how much more “ritualized” the TLM is compared to the Modern Mass. It had/has its own sign language. And it recalled for me how I felt as a young person as changes gradually unfolded in the liturgy between 1965 and 1969. 

What struck me as a more deritualized form of the Mass unfolded, is how blah the Mass became visually with a barrage of words hurled at us and no real ritualization of those words by the use of the Church’s “sign language.” 

The Introductory Rite is a poster child for this “blahness.” The prayers at the foot of the altar, either quietly overlaid with the Introit in a Sung Mass or spoken aloud in a Low Mass, had movement which was sign language, beginning at the foot of the altar, with profound bows, strikes of the breast, signs of the Cross and then upwards to the altar for the Introit, Kyrie and collect and the use of the altar’s center and Epistle side. It was/is like a dance.

In the Modern Mass, the priest goes to the Chair, blabs on in a secular way about the theme of the Mass or those who are at Mass and then uses various options for the Penitential Act, with no movement or sign language and then after the Collect, we all sit. Constant words, no sign language, no ritualizing of the ritual. 

I will use one more example, although there are many more that can be used, the Eucharistic Prayer.

What I recall most vividly was the first Sunday our pastor faced the congregation for the Liturgy of the Eucharist. It was still the Tridentine Mass and the ritualized Roman Canon was still in Latin and low voice, but because he was facing us, we could hear a lot of the canon in his low voice Latin. 

But what really struck this 12 year old was all the ritual and sign language of the TLM’s Roman Canon’s ritualized praying of the Canon. The multiple signs of the cross, multiple genuflections, the bowing, the making of the Sign of the Cross with both the Host and the Chalice prior to the priest’s Communion. The holding the paten sideways prior to the fraction rite, the kissing of it, the multiple signs of the Cross with the Host over the purificator and Chalice at the Per Ipsum. I could see all of that and it kept that 12 year old’s attention.

But by 1968, all that ritualization of the Canon, now called one of the Eucharistic Prayers was canceled and all you got were words from the priest facing you, no rich array of ritualizing those words. 

It was boring and I lost attention quite quickly by 1968-70, age 15 to 17.

SAD—BRING BACK THE RITUALIZED MASS’S RITUAL!

MASS FOR THE 33rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME…

 

I NEVER CEASE TO BE AMAZED BY WHERE MY MOST HUMBLE BLOG IS READ! I’m

 

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I AM TELLING YOU WE ARE GOING BACKWARDS OR LIVE IN PARALLEL TIME AKA “DARK SHADOWS!”

We really are going backwards or progressive Catholics of the National Catholic Reporter type are. Backward, backwards, backward in time or as on the daytime serial that has a cult following with us baby-boomers or parallel time as in Dark Shadows, a la Barnabas.

When I was vocation director in the 80’s and 90’s the enneagram was very popular. Those going backwards in the Church are trying to relive the 80’s and 90’s. This ditty is in Saturday’s National Catholic Reporter:

The enneagram can draw us to God as we understand ourselves and others better

CERTAINLY, A WELL FORMED PERSON, LAY, RELIGIOUS OR CLERY, IS A PERSON WELL GROUNDED BUT FLEXIBLE: INFELXIBITY LEADS TO BREAKAGE

My frustration with Pope Francis is that I never completely get what His Holiness is saying. For example he gave a talk to seminary rectors but gets very muddled when he turns to his one true obsession, rigidity.

This is what the pope said yesterday to these rectors of seminaries and religious houses:

(Pope Francis) added: “One of the most serious temptations that the Church faces today, as you know better than me, is when they come to you with rigid formation schemes … Religious congregations have arisen that are a disaster, which had to be closed little by little, congregations of rigid ‘no, no, no, no...’. And that in the background, behind that rigidity, there is real rottenness hidden … Nowadays, ready-made answers are of no use to the young; we have to accompany them, with clear doctrine, of course, but we have to accompany them in different situations.”

My Comments first: First of all, thank you Pope Francis for saying that priests and religious must accompany people with clear doctrine! I will forget everything else and hold to that!

I am not a psychologist, but the little I do know tells me that the person who complains about particular moral peccadilloes, usually has that “demon” within him. Pope Francis always complains about gossip in the Church, but in the paragraph above, he gossips about rigid people and their rottenness. Really!

He always complains about psychological rigidity which I know is a problem for a small minority of priests. Yet this pope can be quite rigid as well and  I suspect he was that way in his pre-Vatican II version of himself. He speaks about dialogue, meets with a heterodox priest who promotes active homosexuality, yet won’t meet with any of the Cardinals that challenged him with the dubia questions. Rigidity anyone? 

Pope Francis gossips about closing rigid new religious orders, which to give him credit, may have needed it. But he fails to call out the liberal ones, now of life support, for their flexibility that leads to all kinds of immorality and individualism. I have had the unfortunate misfortune to have met and allowed one of the most notorious Jesuits in his order, a serial sex abuse of minors, which his Jesuit brothers knew about and did nothing, to give a mission in my parish in Augusta in the early 1990’s. In that brief encounter of a day or so, he had about 10 young men/teenagers accompanying him to take care of his needs. It raised my eyebrows and I didn’t know him at all. Mercifully he was convicted of his crimes, sent to prison and has since died. Jesuits, heal thyself before healing everyone else. 

He meets with all kinds of people who live in opposition to the teachings of Christ, yet won’t meet with Cardinal Zen of China, who may well be sentenced to prison in China and is being persecuted by Pope Francis and China! It is mind  boggling to say the least.

I have known rigid priests who look down at everyone else, can’ relate to anyone and underneath may be fighting their very own demons. They are in a minority and yes, seminaries have a duty to challenge it, offer formation that leads to some kind of sane flexibility, or release them to the secular world and let him find his place there. 

Most priests I know are so flexible and celebrity oriented, that they won’t rock the boat, don’t want to damage their own popularity and will do anything to win the praises of those to whom they minister. They are the buddy-priests who use the liturgy to enhance their celebrity and offer no real counter-cultural witness but in fact witness to the culture of celebrity and what it takes to remain a celebrity in the eyes of those they want to please. 

I do think, in today’s world and Church, we need to be clear with what the Catholic Church, believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God while being compassionate with those who don’t accept all of it, live lives that are complex in their mix of virtue and sin.

A wise priest told us seminarians in the 1970’s, “challenge don’t crush, be flexible but not like a reed blowing in the wind because rigidity always causes a person to break even in a breeze.”

OF COURSE, IT IS THE TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS THAT MUST BE SUPPRESSED AS HARMFUL TO THE LITURGICAL UNITY OF THE CHURCH, NOT THIS KIND OF MASS AND CERTAINLY BY ALL MEANS ADVERTIZE IT IN THE BULLETIN!

 

Watch this small element of the Normative Mass, not to be suppressed, HERE, IF YOU DARE!

DR. LARRY CHAPP, FAR FROM A RIGHT WING NEO TRADITIONALIST, HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD ABOUT ALL THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED TO A LISTENING CHURCH

 

Southern Baptists, for the most part, believe in the infallibility of the individual “spirit-filled” believer to interpret the Scriptures. They don’t need an intermediary to tell them what to believe, like the Magisterium of a Church or their priestly intercessors.

While these Baptists would decry papal infallibility or the infallibility of an ecumenical council in union with the pope, they believe an a sort of “creeping infallibility” of individual members. 

The same thing is happening with the far left take over of the synodal process with leaders in the highest echelons of the Church. To their far left adherents, who want a different kind of Church of the left, they give the air of infallibility that God is speaking through them and their desire for a different future-church. There is a “creeping infallibility” attributed to the movement of the Holy Spirit. It reminds me of the Catholic Charismatic Movement of the 1970’s which claimed the Holy Spirit was behind every novelty of Protestant Pentecostalism applied to the Catholic Church and her spirituality. How can you argue with that!

Those who demand orthodoxy and renewal in continuity are seen as mentally ill or disordered, because of their so-called “rigidity” and thus not of the Holy Spirit. Only those flexible enough to accept the far left’s “infallibility” are worthy to be heard because it is their vision which will be shoved upon the entire Church eventually. Or maybe not. 

Thus read the ever post-Vatican II’s Larry Chapp’s commentary. I find it interesting, that many who are making so many cogent commentaries on this, both left and right, are laity or lay theologians. This too, for better or worse, is a fruit of Vatican II. Obvious the orthodox lay theologians are infallibly right and of the Holy Spirit! End of listening!

How Christocentric and Spirit-filled are the synodal machinations?

Synodal promoters have now gone beyond pastoral aims, making theological claims about how the results of the synodal process are indicative of the movement of the Holy Spirit and are therefore a true expression of the sensus fidelium.

A WONDERFUL EXAMPLE OF A CATHOLIC LAYMAN AND A WONDERFUL TEMPLATE FOR CATHOLIC OBITUARIES

 

Requiescat in Pace! I knew this gentleman who often attended my parish in Augusta, Most Holy Trinity, although a member of St. Mary on the Hill Parish. What the obituary says is very true. God rest his soul:

Augusta, GA – Albert Patrick “Pat” Johannsen, 75, entered into rest on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. 
Pat Johannsen was a native and lifelong resident of Augusta, GA. He was a graduate of Aquinas High School, attended both Georgia Military, Augusta College and was a devoted member of St. Mary on the Hill Catholic Church. Pat was an active member of the Augusta Country Club, previously serving on the Board of Governors and Chairman of the Golf Committee, Augusta Golf Association, Athletic Dealers Association, and the Hale Foundation. He served as a former President of the Athletic Booster Club of Aquinas High School, and in 1969, he founded Johannsen’s Sporting Goods, affording him to this day the opportunity to serve his beloved athletic community. Pat was a loving husband, father, papa, uncle, and friend. He was a staple in our local business community, a man so grounded in his faith and lived to serve others. He loved life and life loved him. An infectious glow that cultivated families and friends, his legacy will always remain a demonstration of what it meant to be a true gentleman. 

Family members include his wife: Cheryl H. Johannsen; daughters: Kim J. Fulmer (Chip), Megan Moody (Joseph); sons: A. Patrick Johannsen, Stephen S. Johannsen (Tracy), Eric Snellings (Joni); grandchildren: Jackson Patrick Fulmer, Gracie Banks Fulmer, Addyson Snellings, Alyssa Snellings, and Rylan Moody; sister-in-law: Genie Johannsen; nieces: Alison Parrish (Craig), Ashley Fisher (Brendan) and cousins: Florence Booker Chandler and Suzanne Phillips and their families. Pat was preceded in death by his parents, John Emile Johannsen, Sr. and Leonora Meredith Johannsen and his brother: John “Jack” Emile Johannsen, Jr. 

A memorial Mass will be held Monday, November 14, 2022, at 11:00 A.M. at St. Mary on the Hill Catholic Church with Fr. Mark Ross as celebrant. Honorary pallbearers will be members of the Augusta Golf Association. Inurnment will follow in St. Mary on the Hill Columbarium. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Aquinas High School, 1920 Highland Avenue, Augusta, GA 30904. A Rosary will be held on Saturday, November 12, 2022, at 5:00 P.M. in the chapel of Thomas Poteet & Son. The family will receive friends following the Rosary, from 5:30 until 7:30 P.M. at the funeral home.