The 14 stations really caught my eye. For hundreds of years, we have followed the original stations as a way to follow Christ. Now? Energy and mood of the encounter? Colored glass can accomplish this as an aid to prayer more than a depiction of Christ carrying the Cross? My goodness... New agey off the charts. And it seems to be sweeping even the most previously staunchly Catholic areas. The last 15 years here of battering and changing and changing back have left too many people too weary to fight back or even care. I guess that's the goal, because now they can sweep in with their new spirituality and rescue them from the mess they created.
Then there are the four priestess wannabees waving their incense on the altar, the woman helping to spread the altar cloth, the chairs without kneelers, and the ugly, ugly art. There is much, much more - the tabernacle, the altar....
And I love, as so many of us have noticed, the all woman Mass, where the only male is the priest. You know the kind, girl altar servers, women cantors and women lectors and woman organists and as of late women ushers. Not a man in sight except for the priest. Where are all the men?
And as a former priest at my parish said, maybe not now, but soon. 5 years, 10? Surely in his lifetime. What did he mean? Why women priests, of course. As he encouraged the little girls in our rel ed class to consider the priesthood. But not the boys. I did correct him, complain to the pastor, but no one seemed to care, not even the other teachers.
The tabernacle is an afterthought, a nice little storage box, like something you can get at Walmart. The art is not remotely religious, not inspirational, where is the focus on art as teaching about our faith? Is that the goal? Focus seems, deliberately or not, shifted away from Christ and Catholicism and toward, what? Self? New agey?
It's a tower of Babel and a golden calf. Just when you think, how much worse can it get, you hear something new like this one....