And folks wonder about the nostalgia for the Tridentine Mass. The simple fact is that even the aura of that Mass was different. It wasn’t “social.” It was time we owed to God, not to our “community.”
But another issue: what about the intention-prayers prepared by the parish council (or whomever)? Can’t they, too, be misleading or confusing or egregiously political? This past Sunday, we were to answer “Lord, hear us” to a request for “respect for God’s creation and greater attention to the distribution of the world’s natural resources.” I wasn’t sure whether God was supposed to re-resource the world or implant in various civilizations’ brains the technological knowledge of how to USE the resources at hand, or both. I WAS sure that the Rat party was alive and well in the parish.