Holding Hands at the Our Father?

There was an excellent article in the St Louis Review's "Ask Father" section this weekend. All emphasis below is mine...I could not constrain myself!...I think it's great to see a priest mince no words when it comes to liturgical terrorism...

'Dear Father'
Must we be forced to hold hands at the 'Our Father'?

I was recently told by a priest that we were to hold hands during the "Our Father." I can find nowhere in the rubrics about this.
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Fr. Matthew Mitas:I’m afraid that this typifies the kind of liturgical stalinism that has barged into the Church in these post-Vatican II years.

Of course you can’t find anything about it in the official instructions to the priest on how to say Mass because it simply isn’t there.

What we have here is a priest, acting on his own initiative and without any authority, making up his own ritual and trying to force it on the laity.

Our beloved Pope John Paul II addressed the matter of priests’ forcing their own interpretations into the Mass in 1985, in a story carried by the Review on Nov. 8 that year. He said, "One observes regrettable failings (in the liturgy) which must be corrected: such as a too-personalized style, omissions and illicit additions, rites invented outside of the established works ... " He added that such abuses "cause a very sad retardation and deviation in the prayer life of the Church." He would reiterate this same point many, many more times throughout the remainder of his long pontificate.

To argue that such practices as holding hands during the Lord’s Prayer are popular or well-received misses the point; no priest has the authority to impose this on his people. To argue that an abuse is common just proves how sad is the state of affairs to which we’ve devolved. There’s an old maxim of the law: "Sine poena, nulla lex (Where there’s no enforcement, there’s no law)." Until the Church gets serious about enforcing liturgical propriety, this sort of thing will continue to occur.

Any priest who looks at the Mass and says to himself, "How can I change this to make it better?" is really saying, "How can I adapt this to suit my own preference?" He should rather be humble enough to make himself a student of the liturgy, immersing himself in the richness of our 2,000 years of liturgical tradition, much of which is the heritage of saints, and subordinating himself to the wisdom of Holy Mother Church as expressed in her proper liturgical forms.

Kudos to Fr. Mitas for telling it like it is...
Father Mitas is pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Union.

A link to the article is here.