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.
You've got that right.
The way they butchered that church is amazing and appalling.
NoVa is still very good, although I don't trust our bishop. My point was that as much as I found ADW to be an improvement over the DDR*, I found DA to be somewhat of an improvement over ADW. My current parish is in the process of building what will be a deliberately and explicitly traditional church-school-rectory complex, in Spanish Mission architecture. I've compared the drawings to original structures in southern California, and I think they got it right.
And I suppose that one can certainly find abuses here and there in the 140+ parishes in the Archdiocese of Washington.
In Laurel, there's a huge difference between St. Mary of the Mills and St. Nicholas...
a faux-marble tabernacle-less backdrop behind the altar has recently been replaced
Excellent.
Add general absolution to the list. The seeming widespread spirit of disobedience within the clergy is also disturbing.
You know, you're right. That's been my experience. That practice may also be mentioned in these liturgical guidelines. As far as I know, at least in the Catholic Church, the priest is supposed to stand behind the lecturn when delivering the homily.
The liturgy is the public prayer of the Church. That is why the congregation, the Body of Christ, sings, reads, stands and kneels in unison. There is plenty of time during the rest of the week for private prayers and devotions.
And you can clap for the choir all you want in your Church.
Could it be that priests "disobey" or take liberties in certain areas because the particular rule or discipline is not explained, or there are no reasons given for it? Adults not in the military don't take well to "do this because I said so." And much of what has come out of Rome has been decreed on the basis of authority, which is the worst possible justification behind anything.
That's why I'm glad to see this draft leaked. There will now be world-wide input on something that was obviously intended to be clandestine.
Vatican bureaucrats feel that they would somehow be diminished by getting feedback from bishops in what is essentially a revision to discipline.
There are no restrictions on where the homilist stands when delivering the homily.
Great attitude. I'd steer my kids way clear.
Maybe you should ask Jesus why He didn't choose any female apostles.
The reason the Church excommunicated people for things like Communion in the hand was because the Church was defending its most precious possession, the Body of Christ. It's a pity that more people don't see that the reason so many Catholics don't believe the traditional teaching about the Eucharist is because of the complete lack of reverence for the Sacred Species. The traditional disciplines have been proven to be correct by the complete shambles the typical parish liturgy has become.
St. Pius X would run out of a typical Church in horror if he saw what was being practiced today. But I'm sure you would just consider him a naive old fool. He can't compare to Annibale Bugnini, Rembert Weakland and the other "liturgists" who have given the Church her "new springtime".
That must be why Christ Himself, at the Last Supper, said "Take and eat," not "stick out your tongue..."
You think it is sacreligious for a mere layman to touch the Body of Christ. I don't, and the Church doesn't either.
That's possible. Our priest seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that leavened bread was ilicit. Regardless, priests are supposed to obey their superiors, aren't they? (Unless commanded to do something intrinsically immoral). On the other hand, he likes to push the envelope, such as offering general absolution and having dancing girls during the Stations of the Cross. He knows general absolution is supposed to be reserved for grave circumstances, but he has told me that he considers the lack of participation in the sacrament of Penance to be an "emergency."
I thought I heard James Akin mention that once. Maybe things changed under the new GIRM. Otherwise, I stand corrected.
Communion in the Hand was practiced very early in the Church's history, but there were huge differences between the practice as it is today and as it was then. For instance, you had to have a cloth on your hand to receive the Sacred Species, and the cloth was handled with complete care after the reception in order to make sure there were no particles of the Sacred Host left on it. As the Church developed in Her understanding, She realized that the simplest way to preserve the Sacrament from irrevence and profanity was to discontinue the practice and have the recipient receive on the tongue.Of course, no propaganda pamphlet about Communion in the Hand mentions any of this.
You should read Pius XII's encyclical MEDIATOR DEI. He condemned all of these ideas as a heresy called "archaism", as did Pope Pius XI in his condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia, a Jansenist council that wanted to "restore the liturgy to ancient practices". Here is a link to Mediator Dei:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20111947_mediator-dei_en.html
Everything these two Popes condemned is now part of the average liturgy, and now we can see the disastrous consequences of not heeding their prophetic voices.
I leave you with the words of Pius XII:" ... I am obsessed by the confidences of the Virgin to the little Lucy of Fatima. This obstinacy of the good Lady in front of the dangers which threaten the Church is a divine warning against the suicide represented by the alteration of the faith in its liturgy, its theology, in its soul. I hear all around me innovators who want to dismantle the Holy Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, throw away her ornaments, give her a remorse of her historical past. Well my dear friend, I have the conviction that the Church of Peter must assume her past or she will dig her own grave. A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt like Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God, that his Son is a mere symbol, a philosophy like many others and in the churches Christians will seek in vain the red light where God waits for them.”
Monsignor Roche's "Pie XII Devant L'Histoire"
There are plenty of churches out there which govern themselves by majority vote and whose guiding principle is willing surrender to the zeitgeist instead of obedience to the Gospel.
I'm sure the Episcopalians, for instance, would welcome those alienated women, whose real religion is feminism, not Christianity, with open arms. Heaven knows the rest of their membership is evaporating into thin air.
Um, the men present at the Last Supper were all just ordained priests, with consecrated hands, and therefore they weren't laymen. Pretty well known fact for anyone who has picked up a basic text on Church discipline. The priesthood was established at that very moment. Where did you go to school, Rembert Weakland Academy?
St. Thomas Aquinas(the Doctor of the Blessed Sacrament)and St. Alphonse Ligouri, both Doctors of the Church, say that only the priest can handle the Sacred Species and it is a profanation for anyone else to do so. This wasn't even disputed until the 1960's, when Communion in the Hand was introduced in Holland as a defiance of the Holy See. Even Paul VI was against the practice, but weak Pope that he was, gave in(as he did on so many other things). There is much less reverence and even belief in the Blessed Sacrament today, and practices like Communion in the Hand are a big part of the reason.
I don't know much about it (just more than I wish I did), but it is a "mass" celebrated to honor Satan, with the crucifix upside down, desecration of the Host, some kind of distortion of the words and other obscenities.
What exactly is the church's new position regarding Black Mass, compared to the old? Or is this the first time the issue has been addressed?
I think of a "pagan" practice as more like a libation to Apollo (though I know it had darker manifestations, like offering children to Moloch); the "black mass" is purely Satanic.
BlackElk, can you help me out here? I have to get back to work, and I've pretty well already come up with all I know (and it makes me uncomfortable even to think about it).
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