Posted on 03/26/2004 6:47:24 PM PST by Land of the Irish
Helen (a pseudonym) describes herself as devoutly Catholic. She attends St. Anne's Parish Community in Discovery Bay in the diocese of Oakland. Most parishioners there, she says, are excited about the changes in the parish made by their pastor, Father Ron Schmit -- who is also chairman of the art and design committee (formerly referred to as the liturgy committee) for the new Oakland cathedral.
Helen, though, told me a few of the things that bothered her about the parish. For one thing, she said, Father Schmit is very proud that he will be acquiring for the parish a crucifix with a fully naked Jesus. (Another parishioner I talked to joked that perhaps this was Father's way of teaching the pope's Theology of the Body). Another thing that angered Helen happened at Christmas Eve Mass, when two girls, between the ages of ten and twelve, pretending to be Joseph and Mary, danced at Mass to a song with the words, "would you pick some grapes from the tree." Their dresses, Helen said, had slits that went up to the waist.
According to Helen, St Anne's sometimes uses leavened bread for its hosts. "It rose and was sweeter than it should be," she said. "My mother called the rectory, and they insist it's unleavened. They got the recipe off the internet."
Helen is not alone in her confusion about what is happening at her church.
Joyce Davis lived in Discovery Bay for six years, up until 2002, and was a parishioner of St. Anne's. She told me that the pastoral associate, Gail McGuire, reads the Gospel once a month at the Children's Mass and delivers the homily. Davis said she received a letter from Father Schmit in which he said that the reason McGuire does this is that she is "good with children" -- even though the children troop out of the church for the Liturgy of the Word. Once McGuire, said Davis, conducted a Eucharistic service (no Mass) and instructed everyone to bring his chair closer to the altar, thus forming a circle. "Everyone took their own Jesus from the ciborium. I couldn't do it," said Davis. "The Eucharist is something given, not taken."
Joyce also informed me that Father Schmit "pulled the kneelers, and pews out of the church, and had a garage sale." She also said Father Ron wrote in the Contra Costa Times in support of gay marriages. In the March 12, 2000 edition of the Contra Costa Times, Father Ron is quoted as being "saddened" that the bishops supported Proposition 22 banning gay marriages in California. He argued that divorce is also condemned in the Bible, but no one is clamoring to make divorce illegal.
According to Joyce, Father Schmit once said, "the Bible is just a bunch of stories." She said he often uses the term "Spirit of Vatican II" to justify his actions. Furthermore, as if Catholic moral teaching were simply suggestions, she claimed Schmit said, "in a perfect world, we could all follow the catechism".
In early February, Schmit delivered a controversial sermon regarding the nature of the parish as well as the priesthood. At the request of parishioners, within the bulletin he distributed a flier that lists the source material he used for his sermon, which Helen faxed to me. Among his sources was a book written by William J. Bausch, called The Parish of the Next Millenium. According to Helen, Schmit recommends this book to those interested in getting involved with ministry.
Schmit's handout includes the following quotations from Bausch's book: "The parish of the Christian millenium will be lay oriented, with shared and collaborative ministry." "It will be grounded not so much in ordination and office as in baptism and charism, wherein the baptismal call to discipleship binds believers in a common mission, and leadership, conferred with broader input, is respectful of others' gifts and ministries." "It will complete the process of moving from a pyramid to a koinonia (communion) church, with a better balance between male and female spiritualities and influence, greater female representation in decision making; there will be married priests and communion with one another across the earth, those gone before and those to come after." "It will stress the wisdom tradition rather than the intellectual, retrieve the mystical and return to a more holistic spirituality." "It will see a new priesthood within and among the people, a common communion in ministry." "It will move closer to a male-female partnership, a real balance of male-female cooperation and ministry."
After these quotations, the handout has these comments from Father Schmit: "Although these predictions by Fr. Bausch may not be realized as of yet, or as quickly as one might hope, nevertheless they should inspire and move all who minister for Jesus in the daily grind that is our human existence."
According to Helen, Father Schmit's teachings are very well received because, as she put it, many in the parish want to "get away from the authoritarian church" and have "lay people making decisions."
Another handout contained a "psalm," titled, "Do This in Memory of Me," from a book, Psalms for Zero Gravity by Edward Hays (Forest of Peace Publishing). The psalm begins: "Beloved Jesus, Lord of the Meal, I rejoice that a mother and a father, laboring for their family, begin and end each day's work saying, 'This is my body, this is my blood.' An adult child nursing a sick elderly parent with compassion and patient care says 'This is my body, this is my blood.'" The "psalm" then lists a preacher, a singer "forgetting self and the audience, making love out of the music," an artist, teacher, dancer, doctor, auto mechanic, office worker -- and all in their work say, "This is my body, this is my blood." In the last verse of the psalm, we learn that "ten thousand thousand consecrations occur daily, as all heaven's angels chime in, 'Holy, holy, holy,' to the thunderous praise of a thousand silent, silver bells. Listen. Listen."
Father Schmit's handout explains the "psalm" in the following "reflection": "Some theologians as late as the twelfth century held that there was no necessary connection between the consecration of bread and wine into Christ's Body and Blood and sacramental ordination. Gary Macy, chairman of the theology department of the University of San Diego and a scholar of the medieval period, discovered that the first document making a distinction between laity and ritually ordained clergy didn't appear until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215."
Schmit's explanation continues: "To frequently make a gift of yourself in loving compassionate service is being faithful to Jesus, keeping the memory of his gift alive and doing what he did. While his gift-words are officially restricted to the ordained clergy today, Jesus' last request on the night before he died was restricted to neither time nor place, person nor circumstance. We all are called at every moment to live out that request."
I called St Anne's several times to ask Father Schmit to comment for this article. No one returned my calls.
Your theology is right on and it does make sense to a point. However, Jesus did appeared clothed after the resurrection, so that ought to tell us something. Clothes for this world, who knows what for the next. Nakedness in the next world (the symbolism of it) is another horror. I suppose a book could be written about the subject, but we have too much nakedness, lewdness, and shameless in our world today without inviting more of it from wherever it comes.
In a perfect world, complete with proper climate control, nakedness may be the norm, but not in the one I must inhabit.
Thank heaven for clothing. Thank heaven for what we have left of modesty. Some people are modest by nature, and others are naturally exhibitionistic. Blessed are the simpletons who don't flaunt their erotic body parts.
Man, we didn't used to even have to think of such things. Men undressing women in their minds; probably today undressing men in their minds; what blessing it is to be free of such stuff.
I think, with the exception of seriously fallen women, men have different views in this subject than women.
He was clothed with our sins
Can you elaborate? In what sense did our sins "clothe" him? Is this an understanding deriving from scripture or patristic writers?
As for taglines, if you want to deform sacred scripture to make a point, I can't stop you. But I wish you wouldn't.
If God the Father visited your church tomorrow how do you think He would feel to see an image of His only begotten loving Son hanging naked in the center of your church? If you think that he won't mind a bit I would suggust you rethink your theology.
Mat 25:34-40 "Then the King will say to those on His right, 'Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 'For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.' "Then the righteous will answer Him, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? 'And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? 'When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' "The King will answer and say to them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.'
If you can't do it for Christ how can you do it for anyone less?
What can I say except that the scandal of the cross is still with us?
You err in supposing that I'm agitating for a naked crucifix as normative. I'm not, as I've said repeatedly on this thread, because it's more truth than most people know how to deal with. But its value is still there, for all the reasons that I won't bother to rehearse here, as well as for the way it underscores the full humanity of the Word made Flesh, to a world determined to reduce him to a concept. It's a rebuke to the christological heretics who've been among us all these centuries, who pretend that the Word merely inhabited a body without being fully one with it.
By all means let us serve Christ in our fellow man, clothing him when he's naked. Let's especially save him from torture and unjust condemnation to death. But let's not for a minute suppose that the commandment to love of neighbor permits us to respond to the sacrifice of Calvary in any way but gratitude and full acceptance:
And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men."
Now, as for my church. God doesn't visit it; he lives there. His Son is exposed in the Blessed Sacrament for our adoration, and we receive him in the Eucharist. Some folks thought that was scandalous too.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
noun
1. disrespect for religion: disrespect for God or sacred things
2. something showing disrespect for religion: something done or said that shows disrespect for God or sacred things
Try as you might with all the scriptures you can, it’s still
Same problem I'm having find the image in Spain that supposedly looks like the one in Guadalupe. Can't find it and can't travel to Spain to look track down the museum. Now I finally found out it is in a monastery, but no photographs are allowed inside, so there isn't one.
I will say that I did find that on cuttingedge.org. I used to make rosaries using that crucifix.
The upshot of it all is that I don't like that crucifix any more. Maybe what I read poisoned me. I thought it was neat because the pope used it, but when I step back and look at it again, I think it is ugly, but I don't buy the connection to witchcraft either.
The net is something else. It is all but impossible to verify things I find, and I don't like gratitutious or mean-spirited catholic bashing, but I do like to try to get to the bottom of things that disturb me.
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