First, the children of St. Monica were invited to stand around the altar and imitate the gestures of the priest celebrant during the consecration…
Now St. Mary downtown is doing the same…
Thankfully, Fr. Donnelly will retire in June and the circus at St. Mary downtown may soon come to an end. Nobody should be standing at the altar during the consecration except for the priest. Nobody should be imitating gestures at Mass reserved for the priest. Stop sending children to commit your liturgical abuses. If you want to stand around the altar and pretend to elevate the chalice contrary to the liturgical norms of the Church, then do it yourselves.
Also… Wasn’t the reason for offering the Mass versus populum so that the people could see what the priest was doing? How are you supposed to see what’s going on with people standing in front of the altar?
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Is that unleavened bread?
I thought it was corn chex
The baby boomer generation cannot end quickly enough. Is there any end to the damage these clowns have caused outside of the Church…saying nothing of what they’ve done TO the Church. Take a close look at the boys in these pictures. Could they be less interested? Could you see them attending Mass in say, five years? Do you think they will ever come back? Children know when something is stupid and terrible, and what these priests have done qualifies not only as stupid and terrible, but also awkward and boring. They’re killing the Church.
The facial expressions say it all.
Bruce – what you say is SO true, and I”m a baby boomer. Those children, especially the boys, look so disinterested and disconnected. When you look at that picture, the Mass has no mystery; mystery that both boys and girls (and adults too) are looking for. The mystery that is God. While I agree that the Novus Ordo is valid; it still pales in comparison with the Tridentine Rite of Mass. As a baby boomer who never fell for the misinterpretation of Vatican II, I apologizes for all the sanctimonious liberal twits in the Church that have devalued the sacred liturgy, Catholic teachings and devotions, etc. Pray that the scales fall from their collective eyes and they see the truth of what they have done to the Church. Church should be a place of devotion; not commotion.
Wouldn’t St. Mary’s Downtown prefer that the children emulate the modern,with-it female administrator than one of those musty old patriarchal priest-people?
Dr k, if someone from St. Mary’s is reading this blog and doesn’t understand why this is inappropriate. Is there a background article or canon law section you can point them to?
Here is an article about unleavend bread vs. Leavened for anyone interested in that topic:
http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=2253
Anon 11:06. That comment is really unnecessary and doesn’t add anything of value to the discussion. Please show some restraint and respect for those which God has granted authority to. Please take a deep breath and pray for all of us.
Here is the documentation re: standing around the altar, from a dubium to the Congregation for Divine Worship in 1981:
Good articles: here, here and here.
Thanks Dr. K, what happened to the Wikipedia. I was looking to copy paste some of the points from those articles so you didn’t have to do it….
It was underutilized over the past year so I decided to do away with it.
Thanks, anon 9:32 for the kind words.
It should also be noted that w/out videos, pictures, and audio recordings the nonsense that was going on at Corpus Christi would’ve continued on longer.
The saddest thing is that in both pictures, that is all the children they have in the congregation. Our with-it, contraceptive culture seems to be depleting the ranks of future “progressive” Catholic communities.
And with respect to the bread, I spect it contains more than wheat flour and water.
When I hear the bells and see Fr. Bonsignore raise the Eucharist to be adored at the EF Mass at St Stanislaus, it’s all I can do to keep from weeping. Would that Masses everywhere brought about this sense of overwhelming joy to the faithful.
Most people at St. Stanislaus pray along with the priest using hand missals.
Dear anonymous 8:25 – there are no other ingredients? Not a drop of honey, for example? May I ask who cleans the crumbs/fragments up off the floor after communion (which are the very Body of Our Lord?
Anon the last,
I humbly suggest you stay tuned for the future posts in my series on the new translation. We’ll start looking at the actual translation itself, and I think you’ll find it astonishingly “approachable.”
Anonymous, Matt was just being humorous. Humor is a leavening for the heaviness you feel when you see this picture of the children so casually disconnected to the Great Mystery in front of them. You say they are are “just children”, but we who are parents know the preciousness of their innocence and how, when taught about the things of God, their purity allows them to respond to truths with awe and respect. These innocent children are untaught. Such a sad, sad story the picture tells of the DOR not doing its job to teach and to shepherd the innocent children God has entrusted to them. That heavy sadness begs a little levity. Matt’s comment that the odd-looking hosts in the same picture look like Corn Chex gives us a that little bit of relief. Thanks, Matt.
In all seriousness, St. Mary should really choose a better bread for their hosts. Their bread is thick, chewy, leaves a lot of crumbs, and does not taste right.
I don’t know… bread?
Actually, it doesn’t look like corn chex at all, the color is all wrong. Golden Grahams, perhaps…
All kidding aside, the problem with this sort of bread (and believe you me, I have had homemade unleavened bread on a great number of occasions at various screwball Masses, so I say this not in ignorance…) is linked in with the problems inherent with communion in the hand and the disuse of patens and the use of EMHC’s. I am 100 percent certain that crumbs have been dropped on the floor, swept up, and tossed unceremoniously into the trash. That is unacceptable, and it is most certainly sacrilege. If it was given only by the priest, who then performed the older-style ablutions, to communicants on the tongue, over a paten…well, I’d have much less problem with it. It’d still be stupid, but less chance of sacrilege.
The taste is not my chief concern… though strange taste could indicate strange ingredients.
The crumbs left behind are the big problem. Take a look inside the little bowls used by the EMHC at St. Mary downtown when you go up for Communion. Awful lot of crumbs inside. Now take into account that most people at that parish receive in the hand, and you can see how particles of the Blessed Sacrament are likely ending up all over the floor of that church.
Right.
Doesn’t the fact that you would need to inspect the floor support the argument that they should use different bread for the consecration? The risk of particles falling to the ground is certainly there, and high.
Anonymous – there are crumbs of the Sacred Body of Our Lord on the St Mary’s floor. I have nothing against the St. Mary’s communion bread, so long as it’s licit (wheat flour and water only). However, I’m not sure how it’s “heresy” if I were to think otherwise.
There should be a platen used to catch the crumbs.