Rite And Wrong Church Follows Its Conscience, Not The Orders Of The Archdiocese

Part two:

A `vertical’ approach

The more than 400-year-old Latin Tridentine mass (established by the counter-reformation Council of Trent) is “the true mass,” [said worshiper Miguel Garcia]. “God instituted it one way, and we shouldn’t be changing it. That’s what happened at Vatican II.”

Something else happened, according to organist and choir director John Cooper of Clarendon Hills, an insurance salesman and part-time jazz pianist. It’s not just that the new mass “an atrocity.” The new church “hasn’t worked.” Seminaries are closing and mass attendance is down, thanks to “all this liberty baloney. People need some kind of regimentation,” he said.

As Scott put it, “No condemnation, no obligation. Popes always used to condemn things, but liberals don’t believe in condemning anybody.”

Scott terms Pope John Paul II “a conservative liberal” who is “very weak…

Rite And Wrong Church Follows Its Conscience, Not The Orders Of The Archdiocese

Every time Julie Badon, a 46-year-old Berwyn homemaker and lifelong devout Catholic, goes to church in Oak Park on Sunday, she violates an edict of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.

The mass, in which a priest stands with his back to the people, who pray to God with prayer books and rosaries, is celebrated by a priest of the Society of St. Pius X, founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a Frenchman who rejected the reformist Second Vatican Council as the work of the devil and was excommunicated for ordaining bishops on his own.

For Julie Badon and hundreds of other worshipers at Our Lady Immaculate, 410 W. Washington Blvd., ostracism by her church is not too high a price to pay for the consolations of the pre-Vatican II mass and the devotion it inspires.

The bishop said there’s no rule requiring it, you’re free to do as you wish.

The blogger, sympathetic with people in dioceses where this has not been explained, has a solution. Get one of these from our local church goods store:

The “Our Father Holding Hand” is a one-size fits all that you can easily slip on your real hand and then slip off discreetly so the progressive congregant to your left or right has a hand to hold. Meanwhile, your real hands are now reverently folded so that you can pray the Lord’s Prayer without getting stuck in that giant 60’s style peace chain.

Who says the church is in trouble, when there are inventive people like this around?

You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on the Ed Sullivan show. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine, or Milan (for its allying of Christianity with the ruling powers and thus allegedly weakening its prophetic function).

Well I have found one who blames it on the 18th-century philosopher Shaftesbury, a well-known apostle of sentimentalism — you feel and therefore you know — the state of mind that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine embraced by Hobbes and Locke: One idea leads to another? Pay attention: the two may be logically connected and you should take that very seriously, even as a guide in your pursuit of what’s true. Just go for it. It’s how we learn things.

Do not assume that I am rushing to beat a short deadline, I wrote in late ’90s, though in the scheme of things we all labor under a short one. Neither day nor hour has been announced to me. I await the thief in the night like the rest of you.

Still, the uncovered manhole is out there. Ditto drive-by machine-gunning by drug-crazed hippies — the usual assortment of Sudden Happenings. Eternity lurks at every corner. Or as Hector says in Chapman’s Homer, in his goodbye to his mother Hecuba before the final battle, “the solid heape of night.”

Well, when the solid heap of night o’ertakes me, will people bemoan my getting few or no assignments? Or will they happily recall the nonsense here displayed under guise of art and journalism, to name just two of many possible cover stories for all this?

The Shadow knows, but who…

A friend concerned about the noncommercial aspects of Blithe Spirit (my spare-time mixtum-gatherum newsletter of the late ’90s, early 2000s) asked if I had gotten any work from it, meaning corporate work, which pays more than work for publication in most cases.

(You should read Ben Jonson’s correspondence with his lordly patrons. “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” he told Celia, but he still had to live.)

No work from it, I said, and my friend wondered what people will say when they bury me, implying they would not say much if I’d gotten no assignments from it.

Actually, it will little affect me one way or the other at that point, which he surely realizes, but like most people insufficiently. Indeed, even if by slip of lip, it’s strange to speak of point-of-death achievement in terms of work for hire. I love work for hire, but Blithe…

Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford “like all writers, put entertainment first and exaggerated for effect,” says WSJ reviewer Florence King 4/29, reviewing The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (Houghton Mifflin, $40).

The reviewer exaggerates for effect, but the point’s made. In a letter Mitford had tweaked Waugh about his Catholicism, comparing the resurrection of the body to “finding your motor car after a party” and marveling at how mourners say of the departed, “‘She must be in heaven now’ — as though she’d caught the 4:45.”

Waugh called this “a fatuous intrusion” into a world she knew nothing of.

Clever, though.