This lady needs help...

By Justine McCarthy
Tuesday July 10 2007

I STUMBLED upon a Latin Mass last winter. It was grim, joyless, interminable and disquieting. There was no music. Nobody shook hands or brought gifts to the altar. It was as exuberant a celebration of creation as an expired fly left to rot on a window sill.

Vicious and hateful - no one shook hands or had "music" for dancing? And what are these lamentations about the gifts? Does one now neglect to offer himself, uniting his spiritual offerings with Christ crucified, offering with Christ, his own sufferings, joys, blessings, and hopefully, "self" to Him and His Father? Do we really need a reminder to do this, someone we can watch walk up the aisles? Can we not interiorize the "Offertory prayers"? Have we become incapable of this intellectual and spiritual task?

...the officiating priest droned on, with his chasubled back to the congregation. He was, of course, flexing the dead Latin tongue, but it could as easily have been Aramaic or the lingua franca of Mars, such was his incomprehensible mumbling. Clearly, he was having a private conversation with his Maker.

Incomprehensible? Only to those who are self-absorbed, who idolize themselves!

...I left before Mass was over...In the porch, I read a notice listing the regular Latin Mass times and I resolved not to return...I did not feel I had been involved in a religious ceremony. I felt excluded, belittled, resented - an interloper in my own Church, a survivor - for how long more? - of the internal schism that eats away at the insides of the Roman Catholic Church.

...So it was again last weekend when Pope Benedict lifted the post-Vatican II restrictions on the 500-year-old Latin Mass...

But what about Catholics, for Godsake? What about the indomitable faithful sickened by the grievously sinful institutional cover-up of paedophile priests? What about the AIDS-virus carriers who could have been safeguarded by condoms? What about monogamous, loving gays? What about women?

Most 'liberal Catholics' will again bite their tongues rather than criticise this latest genuflection to the fundamentalist clique because, when you are pro-choice you cannot be a bit anti-choice too.

If some people favour a church rite more appropriate to the 16th century, their preference should be accommodated...

But this Tridentinist concession is not a simple toss-up between guitars, tambourines and Kumbaya versus the Council of Trent. The pope's own profoundly political psyche puts paid to such simplism.

This is a man who...condemned record numbers of theologians when he ran the old Inquisition office in Rome, and who denounced feminism for undermining the structures of society.

This is the man who welcomed the illegal joint invader of Iraq, Tony Blair, to the Vatican as a fraternal visitor while threatening politicians in Mexico and Spain with automatic excommunication for legalising abortion and gay marriage.

Seething with venom, is she not? But she still has more - the antithesis of charity:

This is a moral crusader bringing the liberals of the US and Europe to heel by dispensing reprimands and interdicts, as if he is the landlord of Catholicism.

Would that pseudo-Catholics be brought to heel. But their rebellion and disobedience is fueled by the deadly sin of pride. Having abandoned Our Lord and His Church at the prompting of the evil one, they have chosen instead to worship the "self" - as the final arbiter of truth.

As long as he reigns, women will not be priests. His holy grail of 'family values' is a pre-'60s kitchenscape of woman chained to the sink by her rosary beads. Being treated as second-class citizens is normal life for Catholic women. Being made to cover your arms by the Swiss Guard...is par for the course. Still, it beats being burned at the stake.

For some, maybe...heresy and apostasy are capital crimes only in Muslim countries, I believe. This woman, who gravely lacks charity, needs our prayers and do all of those who have become like her. Please pray for her and for her repentance and conversion!