Posted on 09/24/2003 3:06:09 PM PDT by Lorianne
A heated battle has been joined in the Vatican between moderates and conservatives over a directive, called for by the Pope, that would bar altar girls and stop millions of Roman Catholics around the world dancing, or even clapping, in their churches. _________________
Anger at Vatican plan to ban altar girls
John Hooper in Rome Wednesday September 24, 2003 The Guardian
A heated battle has been joined in the Vatican between moderates and conservatives over a directive, called for by the Pope, that would bar altar girls and stop millions of Roman Catholics around the world dancing, or even clapping, in their churches. The document would also clamp down on adult, lay pastoral assistants. It would forbid priests during sermons quoting from ethical texts other than the Gospels. And it would rank services jointly celebrated with Protestant ministers or Orthodox priests alongside black masses as one of the four "most serious" abuses
In a clear effort to block, or, at least dilute, the measure, a leaked text of the draft was this week published in Jesus, the monthly review of the Society of St Paul, an international Catholic organisation.
One Vatican insider was yesterday quoted by the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero as saying it contained "idiocies so mad as to incite fear".
The document was compiled by officials from two Vatican ministries, responsible for doctrine and liturgy, after the Pope called earlier this year for new guidelines on the way masses are held. Many clerics had complained that liberalisation and experiment in recent decades had left them not knowing what was allowed.
Catholics in western, and particularly northern, Europe are likely to be most taken aback by the Vatican officials' determination to block one of the few means of participation in church ritual for women.
The draft text states that priests should only allow girls to help them at mass if they have a special dispensation from their bishop and there is "just cause", which Italian commentators took to mean an absence of boys. According to the leaked draft, priests ought "never to feel themselves obliged to recruit girls".
In developing countries, where the Catholic church now has most of its members, the most controversial injunction will be the one banning "applause and dance within the place of worship, even outside the celebration of [mass]".
Dance is an integral part of worship in Africa and Asia and has figured in numerous services attended by the Pope. Clapping is also commonplace in Italy at weddings, baptisms and even during funerals.
The draft "instruction" was reportedly tabled in June and came in for stiff criticism at a meeting of the two departments. A final version is due to be published this year.
Disobedience to a legitimate authority constituted by God can never, by definition , lead to anything good. In point of fact, it is the quickest way to evil.
Stop trying to make bizarre leaps.
Saying that disobedience to the See of Peter can lead to change for the good is perhaps the bizarrest leap.
Whaaa?
I'm not sure how to respond to this impeccably reasoned criticism.
Women's suffrage came about through the efforts and disobedience of radical feminists. Does that mean we should go back in time and take away the right to vote from women?
I think we should stick with our system as originally conceived, wherein only heads of household who own property are allowed to vote. But this is a digression.
You argument is akin to saying the VW bug is bad because it was one of Hitler's brainchilds.
The plural of "brainchild" is "brainchildren."
The VW Bug is an inanimate object designed to fulfill a morally neutral function: transportation. The introduction of altar girls does not involve mechanical engineering, but social engineering and their intended purpose - disobediently remaking the Catholic liturgy - was not a morally neutral one.
Apples and oranges.
In the case of the beetle, I'd rather have someone make the point that it's a bad car because it's unsafe in an accident rather than saying that the person who conceived it was evil.
I think you are transposing two senses of the word "bad" here.
In the same vein, I would rather you explain why altar girls are a bad idea in 2003 rather than point out that the originators of the concept were 'radical feminist apostates'.
I explained this already. You ignored the explanation.
It is not an ongoing manifestation of disobedience.
Yes it is. It began as a specific act of disobedience and it continues to this day.
It is allowed at the discretion of the bishop under certain circumstances.
Yet many parishes have introduced the practice without such express discretion, many others have introduced it when those "certain circumstances" are not even present. It is an embarrassing mess.
You have not shown any connection or proof of how it ruins the fostering of vocations.
Altar girls, communion in the hand, lay lectors and extraordinary Eucharistic ministers were all introduced in the mid-1970s. Since the priest's responsibilities were so drastically compromised and the training ground for future priests was deconstructed, vocations have been devastated.
Yet curiously, the dioceses which retained the traditional, reverent way of doing things have seen strong vocations. As I pointed out above the conservative Diocese of Lincoln, NE has only a handful of Catholics yet it has 20 times as many seminarians as the Diocese of Chicago - which is the second largest Catholic diocese in America and also one of the first dioceses to introduce these innovations in the 1970s.
The correlation is demonstrable everywhere you care to look. How many seminarians are there in your diocese?
I did not say the motive is irrelevant, and don't make the illogical leap that anyone who supports girl altar servers today has the bad motives of the folks who originally came up with the idea (if indeed they truly had the motives you ascribe to them).
That is precisely what you said. You stated that it does not matter how something happened. Those who have been compromised by the altar girl movement do not necessarily share those motivations, nor did I say they did.
Altar girls were introduced using the usual methodology of apostates: claim that they are necessary in certain rare circumstances, shop for an irresponsible bishop willing to look the other way, and then aggressively promote the practice without regard to circumstance.
I claim that people who support girl altar servers today are not necessaritly radical feminist apostates.
And people who pay income taxes are not necessarily socialists. But they are cooperating with socialism.
My daughter will be an altar server. I have no interest in the priesthood being open to women.
Of course, if your daughter does serve at the altar she may well ask herself why she cannot preside at the altar - and who can blame her? She has been sent an ambiguous, mixed message. The concept of altar girls was introduced precisely to promote such thinking.
In fact, there is no one who would describe me as a feminist either in regards to church doctrine or societal norms in general.
Perhaps this is true. In that context, it is odd that you are so stridently defending a practice disobediently introduced by radical feminists.
I never made any of these claims.
You certainly did.
You said that disobedience doesn't matter as long as it leads to "good" things - a concept which is radically alien to the Catholic faith and as a consequence, demonstrably untrue.
By saying that it does not matter when a liturgical practice began - in your words "15 years or 150 years ago" means that you find tradition to be irrelevant.
You also said that the only question that matters is what altar girls mean "TODAY."
What I said, if you took the time to read my many posts on the subject today, is that traditions and customs should adapt but only after careful and deliberate consideration...this clearly flies in the face of making people happy from moment to moment.
You made no mention of careful and deliberate consideration.
You basically argued that hey, it doesn't matter how something started, hey, it doesn't matter what something is intended to accomplish - do people like it?
The Holy See legislates for the Church. That's why Christ gave the keys to Peter.
Sounds prudent.
It is indeed sad but in light of all the abuse by Priests we either do this or attend another church altogether.
It is a horrible situation to find oneself in. I am lucky enough to be in a parish where this is not a concern.
Boys are very aware of the situation as well and shy away.
As well they should.
It is sad, the church is dying because of mistrust of Bishops McCormack and Christian.
As St. Cyprian said, the floor of Hell is paved with the skulls of evil bishops.
First of all, I'm not trashing the "Novus Ordo" Church. There is only one Church, the Catholic Church. But it is suffering a major crisis. That crisis can be traced to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. This has been admitted by the #2 man in the Church, Cardinal Ratzinger, and by Pope John Paul II himself on ocassion(his 1980 encyclical on the Eucharist where he also talked about touching the Sacred Host as being "A privilege of the ordained", his beatification sermon of Jacinto and Francisco at Fatima, and many other times).
You won't admit there even is a crisis; you diss 1500 years of Catholic tradition to prove yourself right. And when the Vatican actually seems to be making a move to curtail the abuses, you take the side of the American Church establishment and defend things that would have gotten people excommunicated a mere fifty years ago.
Go with what you know.
The bottom line of your post seems to indicate that there is no specific mention of a ban on clapping and dancing.
The bottom line of my post is that Scripture contains dozens of minute and highly detailed descriptions of Temple service and four descriptions of the Last Supper.
There is no outright ban on men being naked during the celebration of the Last Supper, but that does not mean that it's fine for us to strip down in the vestibule before Mass.
Surely you would agree that lack of a mention of a thing is not the same as a specific ban.
Again there are a million inappropriate things which are not specifically legislated against.
As far as "If you could cite the clapping and dancing taking place at the Last Supper, we could have a more directed discussion" is concerned, neither of us were there, so we really don't know what went on there except for what was reported to us. We got the overview, not the play by play.
The Gospel accounts reveal a great deal about the Last Supper - specifically that it followed the pattern of the Passover Seder as celebrated in Judaea of the 1st century.
The Mass as it exists today is traceable to two specific sources: the Jewish synagogue service and the Seder of Passover.
Each element of the Mass: the Introit, the Confiteor, the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Creed, the readings, the homily, the Offertory, the Canon, etc. can be directly traced to a predecessor in Jewish liturgy.
We possess extensive records and regulations concerning those liturgies from precisely Christ's time.
Nowhere do those liturgies contain dancing or clapping - which explains the complete absence of dancing or clapping from all Christian liturgy until the 1800s and from the Mass until 1970.
Which just goes to show how ridiculous excommunicating people for questioning disciplines and rubrics was and is.
Communion in the hand and under both kinds have firm theological bases, and can be traced to early Church practice. They are well established, and there is absolutely no evidence of widespread abuses in either practice.
You can take or leave altar girls, IMO, since altar servers do very little in the Novus Ordo anyway. But reception of the Eucharist is at the heart of Catholic practice, and, without some sort of theological rationale for restricting these practices, the Vatican will have a very difficult time making any retrogression stick. That's why there's so much of an uproar over this draft.
The "crisis" in the Catholic Church is not substantially different from the "crises" being experienced by every other mainstream denomination. The issues are cultural and various, and it is much too facile to blame the current difficulties on "Vatican II."
The Church made a huge mistake in the way it imposed the Novus Ordo in 1969. It would now be another huge mistake to try to restrict options which are common practice all over the world just because, as I suspect, there are Vatican reactionaries who don't like them.
I can't believe this draft would have seen the light of day if John Paul II were in perfect health.
Bishop Bruskewitz follows the GIRM, which means there are lay lectors, communion in the hand, communion under both kinds, Extraodinary Ministers, and references from non-Scriptural sources quoted in homilies in churches in his diocese.
So, it must be something other than liturgical practice that is responsible for increased vocations.
A more accurate way to describe the sequence of events is to say that the introduction of clapping and dancing into formal liturgy is the innovation of man, not the Word of God.
Christianity took over from religions which featured Goddesses, Priestesses, Ritual Prostitution, Dancing Girls,and Sacrificial Sheep,Goats,Bulls,Horses,and Humans.
Christianity marketed itself as the antidote to these practices.
Correct.
which means there are lay lectors,
It doesn't mean that at all. The GIRM permits but does not require lay lectors.
communion in the hand, communion under both kinds, Extraodinary Ministers,
Again these are practices permitted but not required by the GIRM.
One can eliminate all of them and still be in full compliance with the GIRM - and generally in better compliance to boot.
and references from non-Scriptural sources quoted in homilies in churches in his diocese.
This is a straw man you invented. The document concerns readings given at Mass from non-Scriptural sources. There is no proposed ban on quotations from non-Scriptural sources in the homily.
So, it must be something other than liturgical practice that is responsible for increased vocations.
I think that if you randomly attended a Mass in one of Lincoln's parishes and randomly attended a Mass in one of Chicago's parishes, one would find a highly marked difference in liturgical practice.
I lived in Chicago for six years and never attended a Mass said in conformity to the GIRM except twice at Opus Dei Masses.
I'm not disputing that they are used in the Lincoln diocese.
What one will not see there are priests sitting on their duffs while only laity distribute communion, people passing the chalice around the pews, teens in bare-midriff outfits reading the Epistle, etc. as happens quite often in my diocese.
One will also see Masses in that diocese where a priest will do the readings and solely distribute Communion - as opposed to my diocese where a congregation of 20 people apparently necessitates two extraordinary Eucharistic ministers.
I've lived in all three dioceses in the past 20 years.
Going on for 2000 years now, and representing 50% of self-identified Christians.
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