Loosening the orthodoxies

It is good news when columnist Nick
Coleman of the Star Tribune is
unhappy with changes at a Minneapolis parish.
 Previously
Coleman wrote quite a negative column on his Excellency Most Reverend
John Nienstedt, Coadjutor Archbp. of St. Paul and Minneapolis for
actually accepting the truth of the Church’s view on homosexual acts.
 Nick Coleman displays his same accuracy in his political
columns as he does on the few columns he writes concerning the Church.
 His political columns have long been fisked in the
conservative blogosphere and he is working for the same reputation in
St. Blogs.

This time he upset about changes at St
Stephens in Minneapolis which seems to be the same type of
parish as St. Joans and St. Frances Cabrini also in Minneapolis.
 Where the word inclusive means accepting homosexual acts, but
not being inclusive towards orthodoxy.  Inclusive communities
are usually much more dogmatic on the issues they want to be dogmatic
on.  Try going to one of these parishes and dissent on their
teaching on homosexual acts or some of the other typical issues and you
will find out just how “inclusive” they are.

It looks like change are being made there
with the appointment of Fr. Joseph William effective Easter Friday,
March 28, 2008.  A 9. a.m. Mass (Coleman calls it a prayer
service) has now been canceled.  We will let Coleman describe
this Mass for us:

“They
all have to play with the same playbook,” says Dennis McGrath,
spokesman for the archdiocese. “They’ve had plenty of warnings to get
their act together.”

The “playbook” is the GIRM —
“General Instructions of the Roman Missal” — which spells out the
rubrics for worship services. After the Second Ecumenical Vatican
Council in the early 1960s, the orthodoxies loosened and churches,
especially ones in needy neighborhoods like St. Stephen’s, put more
emphasis on carrying out the message of the Gospels than following the
rubrics.

The 9 a.m. service in the school gym
(there’s also a 9 a.m. Spanish-language mass in the church sanctuary)
became a place where all were welcomed, the wording of prayers was
changed to make them inclusive (“Our Father and Mother, Who Art in
Heaven,” for example), women had leadership roles in services, and
simple ceramics were used instead of chalices of precious metal, as
called for in the rubrics.

Coleman writing just cracks me up. Phrases
like “the orthodoxies loosened” show exactly his mindset.  The
idea that Orthodoxy or “right thinking” should be loosened and I guess
substituted for wrong thinking is always unintentionally funny.
 I saw let the orthodoxies be loosed not loosened.
 There is also other typical liberal thought shown here with
the incredibly false idea that before Vatican II that the Gospel was
not carried out and somehow it was prevented from being preached
because of those nasty binding rubrics.  As if great Saints
like Saint Vincent de Paul and countless others could not preach the
Gospel and help the poor because of the rubrics of the Mass.
 Coleman has a Protestant mindset and seems to have no
understanding of the Catholic “Et … et” – the both/and approach that
we take more often.  Helping the poor in needy neighborhoods
is not the reciprocal of following the rubrics and following the
rubrics does not prevent you from living and preaching the Gospel.
 Though as with most inclusive parishes they have their own
rubrics that must be followed.  For example using ceramics and
so-called inclusive language.

Coleman also complains about the
parishioners who will be leaving the parish to go somewhere else five
blocks away with the
same “spirituality” that they were use to at St Stephen’s.

You know the kind of service: with
guitars, lay people giving homilies, dancing in the aisles with people
who have mental and physical disabilities, gay couples openly
participating in worship, along with ex-priests, ex-nuns and sundry
other spiritual wanderers. 

This 9 AM Mass has been going on for forty
years (about time they got out of the wilderness of progressive
liturgy) and so it is understandable that some of the parishioners
would be upset at the change.  It is only too bad that such
nonsense was not stopped much earlier to prevent these types of
defections where it looks like some of them will now being going to a
non-Catholic service.  They should never have been able to get
use to such open dissent and liturgical abuse in the first place.

“It’s incredibly sad,” says Mary Condon
Peters of Golden Valley, who has belonged to St. Stephen’s for 16 years
and served on its parish council. “All these years, there was room in
the big old Catholic tent for all of us. And now there isn’t. And they
gave us three weeks’ notice.”

It was on Feb. 5 that Flynn met with parish representatives and
instructed them that the 9 a.m. prayer service must end. McGrath says
that “nothing of substance” will change, and that the parish outreach
to the poor, the homeless and the Hispanic community will go on.

What you mean that unloosening “the
orthodoxies” does not halt outreach to the poor and others?
 Who would have thunk it?

Clayton who gave me the heads up for this
story will be commenting on it later today.