OK, so...the Church abuse crisis

Not a nice topic for a Sunday afternoon. Not a nice topic ever.

I am soooooo angry, and so grieved, sad, horrified--there are hardly words. I can't say a prayer, read a word of Scripture, or hear a Mass reading without thinking of this still-mushrooming scandal. I want to say so much, but a good deal of it is not remotely charitable. Let's just say I find the image of Jesus cleansing the temple, corded whip in hand, somewhat comforting at this moment.

But there's a lot of grief to deal with too. And don't think our Lord isn't feeling it. His Church (his holy Bride) is being ripped apart: figuratively and potentially literally. Not least by wicked, lying, despicable, hypocritical shepherds (may they all be called to account--every last one of them), but also by us. You and me. Because we are all sinners and that's what sin does: divide and destroy.

Have you watched the Passion of the Christ lately? I did last Lent, and it made me cry, especially the scene where Jesus, shaking with pain, embraces his Cross. He is embracing it now. Will you carry it with Him, or will you stand in the street mocking and shouting?

On the Via Dolorosa, he embraced our sins and carried them to Calvary. Maybe we can't do much about the sins that have been committed by our pastors, but we can do our best to ensure that Christ's burden is not any heavier than it has to be. Our only option at this point is sainthood, ie. striving for holiness in every moment of our lives. And we can only do this by remaining in prayer and by staying as close to Christ as possible. I believe the rest will unfold as it should. Justice will be done, if not on earth, then surely in the hereafter.

In the meantime, here's a good read by Fr. Raymond de Souza. 

Holy Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us.

This is where I need to be in my prayers.

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I put this to the young gentlemen of my acquaintance who may be considering priesthood

Recently hired Diocesan Minister

 for Coordination and Facilitation

  

For example, would a sight of two priests twirling a-tippytoe like big-bellied ballerinas at an Easter Vigil service, along with a troop of girls waving scarves and sashes, for six minutes and more,to Aaron Copland’s arrangement of The Lord of the Dance, have any natural appeal whatsoever to the overwhelming majority of boys and young men who know to what sex they belong?

Bwahaha! Anthony Esolen again. 

At one point, he muses: "I sometimes wonder whether we Catholics actually want vocations to the priesthood." 

Oh Buddy, I don't "wonder"--I've heard it from the horse's mouth. In this case a priest (now deceased, God rest his soul) who said, "The Vocations Crisis is GOD'S WILL, so that the laity gets more involved in the Church." 

Do Catholics want priests? First you have to assume "Catholics" denotes a homogeneous group, which it does not. Some of us want priests, and some of us want the Church to be a Big Comfy Couch...with Communion. 

Clown Minister, dialoguing/collaborating with 

Puppet of St. Therese, to whom the women at the Healing Workshop are encouraged to "speak their pain."

Oh yes, there is pain.

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George Orwell, call the head office of your Hymnody Division

Yo, God, I did you a favour and came to church; 

you're welcome.

Anthony Esolen. Oy, but this guy is brilliant. And funny (to wit: "Muddlesome broke out in hives at leadeth and feedeth.") He had me laughing out loud at, "Fetch the smelling salts, Nellie..."

"Rescuing Hymnody from Stupidity":

To Muddlesome, “the vernacular” meant the colloquial: an office memo ending with an amen. That’s all. He’s no linguist; just as the people who vandalized our churches were not painters or sculptors. He can’t imagine that a mother tongue might “contain multitudes,” including the register of the sacred. He’s a subtractor. If peasants want to be courtly in their oral poetry and folk hymns, too bad for them. Drag them into Future Church for their own good.

 So he had to eliminate those pronouns...

Thus openeth the first Can of Worms.

And my, how far those worms can travel. I actually heard an ordained personage (who has been through like, a hundred years of university and everything) say (out loud) from the ambo: "God calls us to Godself." (Not "himself". Godself.) So allergic was he to masculine pronouns, even referring to GOD THE FATHER (is Jesus' testimony in that regard not enough? Gee, I don't think the chain of authority for Christianity goes any higher than that, but whatever), that instead of uttering a grammatically correct statement, he was willing to sound as though he was having a stroke. But I digress. That was a homily, not a hymn. But church "music" has fared no differently. Read Mr Esolen's article if you share my frustration that we began the century* with hymns like this:

 To Jesus Christ, our Sov'reign King,
Who is the world's salvation,
All praise and homage do we bring,
And thanks and adoration.

Refrain:
Christ Jesus Victor, Christ Jesus Ruler!
Christ Jesus, Lord and Redeemer!

2. Thy reign extend, O King benign,
To ev'ry land and nation,
For in Thy kingdom, Lord divine,
Alone we find salvation.
(Refrain)

3. To Thee and to Thy Church, great King,
We pledge our hearts' oblation,
Until before Thy throne we sing,
In endless jubilation.

--by Msgr Martin Hellreigel

ex-pat German priest, *1941, so... a comment on Fascism

And ended the century with campfire songs like this:

Thank you, God, for giving us us.
Thank you, God, for giving us us.
Thank you, God, for giving us us.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiii-ght where we are!
--ex-Rev. Carey Landry

Peace out.


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From our 'Bureaucracy is a Tool of the Devil" file

Cardinal Pell's reforms at the Vatican, and how the first round of resistance against him failed. (I hope he wears a Kevlar vest.)

But calumny, alas, is what happens when people who have long thought of the Church as their private property, and perhaps even their private piggy-bank, run into a determined and incorruptible reformer who understands that financial probity is essential to our being the “Church in permanent mission” to which Pope Francis has called us.

H/t Peter R on Facebook
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Today's Gospel

John 2:13-25: where Jesus unexpectedly shows up at the  annual diocesan $300 a plate fundraising banquet temple. We were reminded this week to take part in Share Lent (though now--quelle surprise!-- Development and Peace has expanded it to Share Year Round. They despise rich captialists, but are always happy to take their money). A letter was read that quoted a Brazilian bishop who used "root causes" and "solidarity" in the same paragraph. He lost me at "root causes."

The bishop from Brazil lauded his local Pastoral Land Commission, which is “acting against hunger, violence and the concentration of ownership of land, all of which oppose God’s plans for a more just and compassionate world.”

I'm curious to know how that 'concentration of ownership of land' comment went over with the ladies and gentlemen in the pews who would be considered "big farmers." I'll bet they had no idea that they were opposing God's plans for a more just and compassionate world. Oh well, they can make it all better by giving generously to D&P. (I'm glad the Church stopped selling Indulgences.) 

I am all for peace, justice and development, but the path to that is not via socialism and/or bureaucracy. 

Besides, when it comes to D&P, I'm still not quite over this. I prefer to donate to Catholic charities that have not, do not, and will not, ignore church teaching.
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Lenten retreats: plus ça change

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Wacky retreats and workshops are still going on in church circles, and probably always will.

(h/t for the link: Peter Rosengren on Facebook).

“He would tell parishioners to close their eyes, relax their muscles and imagine a blue light going through their whole body and even into their organs. I sat in my pew and thought it was very odd,” said Paul Annee, an 18-year-old Catholic high-school student

 Like, this blue light? Well, okay then.

It reminds me of the column below, which I published over a decade ago in Alberta Report. It prompted Ms Shaidle (on her now defunct Relapsed Catholic blog) to call me "a brunette, Saskatoonian [sic] Ann Coulter." Heh.

The piece is archived online, but if you read it here, you don't have to pay, or even register. You're welcome.

I'd better copyright this

Before some overpaid professional-fundraiser church bureaucrat type guy decides to use the last sentence as a slogan for the next diocesan financial appeal.

Thank you: CBW III, feminism, and the Spirit of Vatican II

Because of you, people are all confused about hymns. (Lots more than that, actually, but we can talk about hymns for now). In the old days, people used to memorize hymns. We could sing them without books. The words never changed. Now, thanks to the Spirit of Vatican II, we don't memorize anything, because that's bad. Memorization means your faith is empty. It's all about love and God meeting us where we're at. So now we love hymns, especially anything with a polka beat written by Carey Haugenhaaschutte, but we can't sing them without books. (Photocopying and overhead projection are illegal.)

Many parishes have hymn books of course, but they can be difficult to manage during processions, especially when you are also holding palms and/or children's hands. And furthermore, many parishes now have several different hymn books, with different versions of the same hymn in different books, because the exclusive patriarchal hateful lyrics had to be expunged in favour of the ones with rainbows and unicorns in them. Thanks, feminism and CBW III.

Let us take, for example, the hymn "All Glory, Laud and Honor," which is traditionally sung on Palm Sunday. The CBW III got rid of the word "laud" because it's, like, so Latin and everything. And what is Latin good for anyway (liturgy aside) except every academic subject under the sun, plus spelling. We had to get rid of "thee" and "thou" "thy" and "didst" because that's just archaic language, and it makes the hymn sound all old and horrible, like you're saying a poem or something equally as gross and irrelevant! "Mortal men" had to go for sure, because they're all sexist and dying and everything. (Who wants to think about death? At a happy time like Easter? Bunnies! Candy!) The phrase "mortal men" was replaced with the much more inclusive, modern, relevant and melodic-sounding pronoun "we".

So anyway, the long and the short of it is that thanks to all the forces conspiring to make our liturgy more relevant, more inclusive, more loving and easier for the lay people to be empowered to participate... the end result is that in our parish, on Palm Sunday, no one knew the words to the hymn. No one. And can you blame us? Cuz it really was two different hymns, and frankly, no one knew whether we were supposed to be singing the patriarchal or the unicorn verson.

So instead of re-enacting Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, our Palm Sunday Procession was more like the Awkard and Silent Shuffle into Jerusalem.

Holy Week has begun, and I continue to learn: there is more than one way to live the Passion.
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I love him already

"reform of the...Vatican’s bureaucratic arm is high on the agenda." 

Some good articles about Pope Francis at MercatorNet. 

Maybe Pope Francis's reform will have  a trickle-down effect. It is scandelous how various dioceses with their multi-million dollar office complexes spend so much time, energy and money on useless programs, promoting  speakers and workshops that embrace heresy or nonsense, and (my favourite) more and more and  more forever and ever, amen: fundraising. (Because, as you know, it's impossible to evangelize without money, just being holy where you are.) 

You wonder how the great saints and martyrs of the past ever managed to found charities, schools, hospitals, and evangelize thousands without being backed by a multi-million dollar bureaucratic structure. It's interesting to note that most (if not all) the 'successful' (ie, actually bringing souls to Christ) apostolates around these days started out as an idea that some nobody layperson had, and not as the result of a diocesan initiative. 

"The Church needs saints, not bureaucrats" (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 1995)

And this just discovered (by me) from a book by the former Cardinal Borgoglio:

In the history of the Catholic Church, the true renovators are the saints. They are true reformers, the ones who change, transform, lead and revive spiritual paths. Another example: Francis of Assisi, who introduced a new attitude towards poverty in Christianity when faced with the luxury, pride and vanity of the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the time. He introduced a mysticism of poverty, of detachment, and he changed history.

I pray that we have such a saint in the Chair of Peter right now.

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Carey Haugenhaaschutte, call your office.

Or your tree branch, or wherever you do your campfire song composing. Peter Rosengren at The Record (yes, he's my editor) with a short but pointed piece on modern liturgy. He ventures that some music today in Australian parishes is not just "contra-liturgical" but toxic. Ouch. But true (and for Canada too.)

 

Groovy. Love the imagery of the guitar nudging the Eucharist off-centre. Prophetic.

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Bureaucracy comes from hell.

The Sultan rocks.

Large operations tend toward greater degrees of inefficiency due to the diffusion of responsibility and accountability. Large systems respond to inefficiency by creating more redundant structures which only increase the inefficiency.

Bureaucracies cope with all problems by adding new layers of paperwork without recognizing that paperwork is itself the problem. The world outside comes to be modeled through paper so that rather than interacting with problems, the system interacts with a paperwork model of the real world that is detached from the real world and requires ever increasing resource of paperwork handlers to maintain.
[...]

 The problems become institutionalized and unsolvable because the institutionalization of a problem creates a bureaucratic mandate for the survival of the institutions dedicated to solving the problem and the institutions dedicated to solving the problem seek to survive by not solving the problem.

(This is, incidentally, why we will never see an end to poverty, aboriginal issues, drug abuse, or any garden-variety disease for which we need perpetual 'awareness' campaigns.)

It's hard enough to endure this with everything that is touched by the government, but a thousand times more horrifying when one sees the church at various levels sink deeper into this mire. A certain Cardinal (I think his name was Ratzinger) said it best about 30 years ago: "The Church needs saints, not bureaucrats."

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Ten examples of Catholic-speak that should be banned

Only ten? Not remotely. But as Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith points out, this is his list. You are welcome to make up your own. 

9) Ongoing. This is a great favourite, especially when nothing is in fact going on. “Our investigations are ongoing” translates as: “We are doing nothing about it at present, except fob you off with words.”

6) Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Just ban it. Now. Never let these words be mentioned together again. Ever.

3) Share.

The Curt Jester adds to the fun.

2) Faith Community 

This could well turn into an ongoing continuing series. 
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Marty Haugen: weapon of Mass destruction

Lawks, I just can't stomach about 98% of his 'music'. But it's not just him, of course: Haas, Landry, Schutte (and the whole St. Louis Jesuit gang), Ceasar (as in Buddy, not Julius)--the list goes depressingly on.  

Kevin O'Brien says it best:

Indeed, I personally think the heterodox music of the typical suburban parish is far more the cause of the abandonment of faith than the dumbing down of the translation of the Mass. Marty Haugen and his ilk have the distinguishing talent of having written appallingly bad music that defies genre or classification or description. There's no music this bad, this cloying, this icky, this smarmy anywhere else but inside thousands of suburban Catholic churches every day of the week. Almost no men like this dreck. And it's not even the insipid lyrics that do harm, but the utter narcissism of the melodies. These songs do not even make good pop tunes or Broadway show tunes - they don't make good anything but good distractions.

Then there's Catholic Music: It’s Time to Stop Making Stuff Up by Jeffrey Tucker:

Mandatory enthusiasm for someone else’s project doesn’t go over well in any aspect of life, especially not in music. Many just sit there vaguely and habitually protesting in their minds. So the musicians end up with a feeling of failure and confusion. Or they blame others and end up getting mad about the people and their refusal to go with the program.

I chuckled when I read this passage because it reminded me of a vist to a neighbouring parish where the semi-professional perfomers Music Ministers were trying to bully the congregation into clapping and swaying. As if.
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LOL and I really mean it.

I consider a piece of writing funny if it makes me laugh out loud--once. And that's not easy to do. When I read this, I lost count of the LOL moments, somewhere around 8. He is (she said under her breath) almost funnier than Mark Steyn.

"Paint-by-Number Hymns" by one Anthony Esolen. He should keep his day job (English prof) but also look into doing church stand up comedy. I am so going to look into his other writing.

And I am so jealous that I didn't write this. (Indeed couldn't write it if I tried.)
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From our Killer Headlines files

Vatican criticizes US nun's book on sexuality

the author, Sr. Margaret Farley

Heaven help us, you can't make this stuff up.

Farley said Monday she never intended the book to reflect current official Catholic teaching. Rather, she said, she wrote it to explore sexuality via various religious traditions, theological resources and human experience.

Because if there's anything you expect Catholic nuns to be doing on any given day, it's:

a) exploring sexuality "via... human experience" (whose?)
b) trying NOT to reflect Church teaching

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To paraphrase Flannery

If this is pastoral sensitivity, then to hell with it.

George Neumayr on the ongoing saga of the lesbian Buddhist, the priest who refused her Communion, and the cardinal who made his choice between the two. Warning: not for the faint of heart...

Perversely, Cardinal Wuerl has at once violated the canonical rights of a faithful priest while inventing out of thin air a "policy" that orders his subordinates to distribute the Eucharist to anti-Catholic activists and defiant mortal sinners. In his apology to Barbara Johnson, via one of his auxiliary bishops, Cardinal Wuerl rebuked Fr. Guarnizo for a lack of "pastoral" sensitivity. This is Cardinal Wuerl's euphemism for priestly action that takes orthodox teaching and discipline seriously.

The word "pastoral" should make the faithful groan at this point. It is one of the great weasel words of the "spirit of Vatican II" Church in America. The word "pastoral" invariably dribbles from the lips of bishops like Cardinal Wuerl who regularly expose their flocks to wolves. Jesus Christ said that the "good shepherd" watches the gate. Cardinal Wuerl's "policy" is to leave it wide open for the Church's fiercest enemies. This is why the Pelosis and the Barbara Johnsons just keep coming up for Communion. Since Cardinal Wuerl refuses to control the sacrament, they will.

[...]

A Church official who has watched Wuerl's persecution of Fr. Guarnizo with horror commented to me that if Jesus Christ had served in Cardinal Wuerl's archdiocese "he would be on administrative leave too." 

The end of D&P is near

I didn't say it first. But I agree with what Colin has to say over at SCCB.

I got an idea - why not use the money cut-back as the excuse for why D & P needs to get rid of the anti-Catholic staff that has just become such a source of embarrassment to the bishops?

Also checking Fr. de Souza's article, to which Colin links.
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Too busy to blog

Because of music festival. But it's Pundette to the rescue, with her handy "Quoteworthy" sidebar:


If Cardinal Wuerl doesn't have the guts to deny Communion to an agitprop lesbian Buddhist, he should just close up shop and hand the keys to his chancery over to Obama. George Neumayr
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All things work together for good to those that love God

So the CDN government is cutting funding to the heavily left-wing-Catholic-not-so-much, "we-have-no-policy-on-abortion" D&P. Government should not be in the business of funding charity period, never mind supposedly church-based organizations. Let us ordinary folk keep more of our tax dollars and we'll fund the charity. The worst thing any religious organization can do is start taking handouts from government.

By the by, I am curious to know exactly what percentage of D&P's annual intake goes to The Poor (TM) and what gets gobbled up by the bloated bureaucracy/staff, PR campaigns, union dues and various other overhead costs.

The funding cut has prompted the union representing D&P employees to circulate a 12-page document criticizing Casey and his team for failing to fight the government. 

Methinks the union is less concerned for The Poor than it is for the union.

The article says that D&P's (overseas) partners will be the ones who suffer 'the most'. No ****, Sherlock. This is likely because, staff layoffs aside, D&P will cut funding to projects before they will dismantle their own bureaucrazy (Freudian typo, but I'll leave it). 

Defunding long-term development partnerships and an increased emphasis on emergency relief is distorting the social justice mandate of D&P, according to the union.
“Without a genuine debate, the mission of the organization is being insidiously changed,” said the document

From your lips to God's ears. But I wouldn't use the term "insidiously" --maybe more like "mysterious ways"--Romans 8:28 and all that. Wouldn't it be great if it became a Catholic charitable organization instead of the Che Guevara fan club? Maybe instead of hissy fits, it's time to just let go and let God. He has a way of bringing good out of evil. In the meantime, there are a lot of other worthy Catholic charities our there.
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The Smorgasbord Stations of the Cross

Oy, I’m so very, very tired of these things. An elderly relative recently complained that in his parish they had to pray some hippy-dippy environmentalist Peace ‘n Justice™ Stations of the Cross. These have been around forever—well, since the late 60’s, but according to the Followers of the Spirit of Vatican II, that is when the Church really began.

More and more parishes are turning back to the many beautiful traditional versions of the Stations of the Cross. You know, the ones that meditate upon (as crazy as it sounds) the actual Passion of Jesus Christ, that guy who died on the cross to redeem all of creation. And not so that 2000 years on, we could bow down and worship trees.

But you still see the odd abomination around: The Wimmin’s Way of the Cross; The Wounded Earth Stations of the Cross; The Dustbowl Farmers’ Stations of the Cross; The Self-absorbed Teenagers’ Stations of the Cross (The 10^th Station: Jesus is stripped of his garments: we pray for those who feel ostracized because they can’t afford the designer clothing that everyone else is wearing); The Animal Rights Activists’ Stations of the Cross; The Morbidly Obese Dissenting Nuns Stations of the Cross. (Some of the preceding are real and some are made up, but the sad part is, you probably can’t tell).

I still remember suffering through my first such Way of the Cross. I was so irked that (of course) I had to write about it to purge myself. It was printed in the March, 1999, issue of Catholic Insight. How I wish such columns were out of date.