Continued here....Father Joe Kempf and his companion Big Al made an appearance at LA's Religious Ed Convention earlier this year. The former presided at the Young Adult-themed Mass held in the Marriott Marquis Ballroom. Father Joe is the author of No One Cries the Wrong Way: Seeing God Through Tears. If you have a long masochistic streak, you can watch a video of Father Joe in homiletic action, with his puppet, here.
Most of us will find the performance cringe-making. For the L.A. Mass we see the words to Dan Schutte's "Here I Am, Lord" Power Pointed onto the rood screen. It's pretty safe to say that if you like Dan Schutte, you'll appreciate Father Joe.
And it is, importantly, a performance. That in itself means a bad fit at Mass. But the wrongness goes deeper. The Jesus that Fr. Joe offers us is uniformly and extravagantly soft, uniformly and extravagantly sweet. It might be objected that this super-sugary Jesus is aimed not at parents but at children, yet I think even a child would recognize something morbid in the figure of a man lacking the strength and authority proper to manhood -- not to mention Kempf's amputation of the severity (intermingled with compassion) that Jesus displays in the Gospels....
Fr. Kempf is pastor of Assumption Parish is O'Fallon, Missouri. For those who might not recall, He received the "Great Preacher Award" from Aquinas Institute back in 2004.
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