Saturday, April 3, 2010

Why Bother?

A friend just told me an interesting anecdote from the Novus Ordo Good Friday service he attended yesterday.

They had a relic of the True Cross to venerate and had people genuflect beforehand in a nod to tradition.

Afterward, some Novus Ordo fanboy asked the priest why he should genuflect to a piece of wood when we don't even have to do that to God Himself when we go up and receive communion.

From what I can tell, I think he may have actually been being confrontational or antagonistic about this, in an anti-traditional vein. And yet...he has a point.

Why do we double-genuflect to the monstrance during adoration even (let alone a relic of the cross) when any day at Mass we can just waltz up there and take communion, standing, in the hand, from some lay woman with a bare head?!?

Is there any consistency anymore? It's so depressing because modern Catholicism is like a joke, just a wimpy shadow of what it used to be (and could still be). And yet while throwing all the important things out the window flippantly (like the liturgy, communion on the tongue, fasting)...they cling so stubbornly to their feudal corrupt institutional structures.

Sometimes it feels like all the meaningfulness is gone; it's like it all only exists now to perpetuate itself, like an empty shell that keeps going only from its own inertia. It's so sad. And every time we think things might be getting better, they show themselves to still be utterly stagnating, or worse.

1 comment:

Kelly said...

Get a copy of "The Gates of Hell" by Anne Roche. Might be hard to find---it's a little old. But she describes a lot of the internally-contradictory nuttiness that got thrown off, seemingly by centrifugal force, after Vatican II.