After seeing today’s PPOTD at American Papist I
couldn’t resist.
The Catholic Church is like a box of chocolates. With 24
Catholic Churches that can be grouped into eight different
rites you can really sink your teeth into the truth.
Maureen at Aliens in This World come up
with the TOP
TEN CONTRADICTORY ATTITUDES OF THE SIXTIES BUNCH
10. Demonstrations and marches are good.
Eucharistic and saint-day processions are bad.
9. Incense at home to cover up that marijuana smell is good. Yay,
Sanskrit chant!
Incense in church to waft prayers to Heaven is bad. Boo, Gregorian
chant!
8. Renovating old houses and antiques to their original condition is
good.
Maintaining old churches in their original condition is bad.
7. Indoctrinating children from birth to love peace is good.
Baptizing children soon after birth, and teaching them the Christian
faith, is bad.
6. It’s good for kids to learn a second language. Bilingual education
is great.
It’s bad for kids to learn Latin. Teaching Mass parts in Latin or Greek
is abusive.
5. Early music is good, especially on the original instruments and for
its original purposes.
Early music in Mass is bad, especially on the original instruments and
for its original purposes.
4. Grassroots movements are good.
Grassroots traditional religious movements are bad.
3. Diversity and experimentation is good.
Diversity within religious tradition is bad.
2. Alternative lifestyle choices are good.
Chaste alternate lifestyle choices are bad.
And the number one contradictory attitude of the Sixties Bunch?
1. All life is sacred, and every person has worth and is good!
Babies we don’t want are bad.
To which I add my own list of ten in no particular order.
- Being a consciousness objector is good
A pharmacist being a consciousness objector is a bad thing - Having choice is a good thing
Having more than one form of Mass in the Latin Rite is a bad thing. - We should help the poor in all cases
A pro-life pregnancy center that helps poor women is a bad thing and in
fact should have rigorous inspections unlike abortion clinics - Celebrating women is a good thing
Devotions to Mary are a bad thing - We need lots of arts in the public square
Actually having statues and beautiful things in a church is bad. - Using organic foods and being careful to avoid chemicals in
your food is good.
Not using chemical contraceptives is bad. - We are all one we must go beyond skin color.
Whites adopting black children is bad. - Protest marches are good.
Protesting in front of an abortion clinic is bad. - Vatican II was good.
Following the documents of Vatican II is bad. - The laity getting more involved with the Church is good.
Lay Catholic apologists are bad.
Blogger
Scott Waddell sent me me a link to the following story.
Dottie Zimmerman is a 63-year-old
mother
of three, an award-winning religion teacher at a Toledo Catholic
school, a former Ursuline nun, and a director of the Children’s Theatre
Workshop.
For the last five years, Mrs. Zimmerman also says she has been
“channeling” Padre Pio, letting the dead Italian Catholic saint
mystically speak through her.
Last month, Mrs. Zimmerman channeled the saint during a meeting of the
Toledo Lightworkers Co-op, a group of people who explore alternative
spirituality.
It was the fifth or sixth time she has publicly channeled Padre Pio, a
Capuchin friar from Pietrelcina, Italy, who was known for bearing
stigmata, or the wounds of Christ, on his hands and feet. He died in
1968 at age 81 and was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002.
Why am I not surprised that an award
winning religion teacher at a Catholic school could even speak of using channeling in relation to Saint? Or that she would do so for some new age group.
An eighth-grade religion teacher at St. Patrick of Heatherdowns School
for nearly 30 years, Mrs. Zimmerman said she felt as though spiritual
conversations had been percolating within her for years before she
began to explore her gift.
She had dismissed the voices as figments of her overactive imagination.
“I’m a very creative, right-brained person so this must be just me
imposing my imagination on situations,” she said. “That sounded logical
to me.”
I say go with your original instincts.
Now exactly what are these messages?
…”One of the things that he
insists is that we breathe deeply and we
laugh – love, laugh,”
…”All presidential elections are a reflection of
the way the world is at the moment. They all speak of change,” Mrs.
Zimmerman said while channeling. “So if you’re looking for change, you
have a wide path. They are all having their plans, their paths. Which
one do you feel comfortable with? That, my brother, is your choice and
I cannot tell you that.”
I think she channeled Obama by mistake.
…”But do know that there was no
accident that there was a female within
this, because her purpose was to open the awareness of the line of the
females, of the path of the females, not her particularly, but the path
of a female, that nurturing, that love aspect that is part of what goes
along with the term female.”
Yeah that really sounds like something
St. Padre Pio would say.
…Regarding the Sept. 11, 2001,
tragedy, Mrs. Zimmerman said while
channeling that everyone who “transitioned” that day went immediately
“home,” or into heaven, “including those who perpetrated this
particular incident. They didn’t have their 21 virgins in their party
but they were celebrated for three days in partying and love and
acceptance because they did what they thought they were supposed to do.”
Gee and I would have thought that the terrorists might spend at least 4
seconds in purgatory first.
This paragraph I have to admit is one
of the funniest I have ever read. Put down your drink cups – you have
been warned.
“In this dream I kept seeing a Merlin
character,” she said. “… So he
[Mr. Uhl] said if he’s reoccurring that much, there’s some energy there
that we need to look into, and he gave me a couple exercises where in
fact I would start asking Merlin what he meant or why this happened in
the dream. … And I would write answers, and it’s like the answers would
just come automatically. … Well, pretty soon I couldn’t write fast
enough, they were just going in the computer, and then one day he just
says to me, ‘You know, I am not Merlin. I am Padre Pio.'”
Natural mistake many people make. They both had these robes
you know.
Mrs. Zimmerman said she channels other
spirits besides Padre Pio.
Every Saturday, for example, she channels her mother, who died two
years ago, by typing out a letter to her surviving father, which she
has collected in a looseleaf binder. “He really looks forward to it
because he misses her so dreadfully,” she said.
She also channels her late husband, John, who “crossed over” 16 years
ago.
I guess she has a party line.
Now I don’t intend to mock this deluded
women who needs our prayers, but what I find so interesting is the
straight reporting on this. I wonder if somebody was actually
getting locutions form St. Padre Pio and the messages included
references to abortion and the culture of death how the story would be
dealt with? Somehow I think the story would be reported quite
differently with quite a different tone.
I do enjoy it when my own humor sparks others to their own hilarity. I jested the other day:
If women are being called to the priesthood then why is it only dissident women that are being called? Where are the women being ordained that have a preference for the extraordinary form of the Mass? Why do they always have a preference for Hippy stoles and not beautifully embroidered ones. Where are the traditionalist women priestesses who are being called?
Well Mulier Fortis answered the call to be a traddy womynpriest in a hilarious post that should be read in full.
If that wasn’t fun enough Fr. Z does a hilarious parady fisk of the questions asked by Mulier Fortis.
I hope that I don’t come off as paranoid or as someone who relishes conspiracy theories. I have no tinfoil hat and I am afraid that even the thickest grade of tinfoil will not protect us from this threat. Now this intro may seem a little overblown, but let me give you some documentary evidence before I make the case about this looming threat. Please forgive me for these graphic images, but sometimes we must see the reality to be shocked into action.
These photographs were all taken during Catholic Masses or were from
events such as a Eucharistic Conference. These puppets seem to come in all sizes from cute and cuddly, human size, to gigantic. Though there is a surprising consistency to all of them of a lack of joy and a very dour disposition. At first I thought it was just a coincidence to find all of these puppets used in liturgical contexts within a relatively short period of time.
I soon started pondering if perhaps something more nefarious was behind all of this. I know I for one do not welcome our new puppet overlords. As a SF fan I thought about Robert Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters where an alien slug-like creature took over the leadership and started to take control. When I first started seeing this puppets I thought their introduction was totally alien to the liturgy, that is when it struck me “alien” to the liturgy – what if aliens in the liturgy? I started to try to think what if I was part of a liturgically minded alien race whose different forms often looked like puppets. What steps would I do to infiltrate and then slowly become accepted until it was too late. Well if I was such an alien obviously I would go to the Religious Education Conference in Los Angeles. This would be the perfect hub to take control since many diocese send their people involved in liturgy there and they they pass on the latest liturgical fads to their own diocese. So I started to do some more investigation and it was not long till l found a picture of Rev. Joe Kempf. during the Gospel reading for a young adult liturgy at the RECongress in 2008.
Now you might somehow barely fathom puppets at Mass for children, but to give the Sesame Street treatment to a group of teenagers and above? Obviously these alien puppet-like creatures have hypnotic control or how else can you explain young adults being treated like this? I then wondered if they infiltrated the Diocese of Los Angeles Religious Education Conference than what else might they have they taken over? I once again tried to tap myself into the mind of these liturgically minded aliens as a kind of alien profiler. If I was in their shoes (or i guess in some cases a sock) what would I do to give me a strategic position and at the same time give me a good defensive stronghold once our plans were fully discovered?
It then dawned on me that Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral was a horrible design for a Catholic Church, but a great design for a defensive bunker. All that concrete would be perfect defense. But what alien artifacts might be already inside the Cathedral?
Why in the world would anybody pay one million dollars for this actual tabernacle in the Cathedral? The only sane interpretation is that the money was needed to create this alien artifact whose purpose I can not discern. If I put up a quiz with this picture and asked – alien artifact or tabernacle – which would you choose? Though it could be related to one of the liturgical puppet races since is has that same sad dour look to it. But if the L.A. Cathedral was actually designed as a bunker then this means this conspiracy goes all the way to the top!
No wonder Cardinal Mahony speaks so often about illegal aliens! He has been covering for the liturgical puppet aliens all along. First you slowly introduce all kinds of odd elements into the liturgy and pretty soon people won’t bat an eye at puppets being involved. Though I think I can discern a weakness in these human looking helpers for the liturgical puppet aliens. The answer was in front of us all along. Obviously they are deathly afraid of precious metals which is why they can only use glass chalices. Long after Redemptionis Sacramentum was published glass chalices and pitchers are still being used. We must hunt down these liturgists within. I suggest a crucifix made out of precious metal such as silver to test them. No wonder liturgists have done their best to get rid of silver and gold crucifixes.
Wake up people and act! Or else instead of mariology we will be force to learn marionetteology.
Update: I had originally identified Robert Scholla, S.J. as the priest with the puppet as per the REConference website. It was mistaken, the priest in the photo is Rev. Joe Kempf.
Here’s an idea. I would really like to see a new document come out from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. In it the document would call for guitar and percussion instruments to be given high esteem. Liturgical dance would also be called out to be given pride of place. While we are at it we could also have experimentation with the liturgy to be also given pride of place. The document could then go on to list songs by Marty Haugen and David Haas and similar contemporary composers in other countries to be given high esteem.
Now you might wonder if I have flipped my lid, but the actuality is that words just don’t mean what we think they mean. For example Vatican II called for the pipe organ to be given high esteem and for Gregorian Chant to be given pride of place. After reflecting on this I realized that pride of place and high esteem means to virtually eliminate it from the liturgy. Or at least that seems to be the result of the interpretation of these documents. If only we could make impoverished elements of the modern liturgy the pride of place and high esteem that they gave the pipe organ and Gregorian Chant.
Today the New Liturgical Movement posted an excellent interview with Fr. Weber by Zenit concerning Gregorian Chant.