Too Big for our own Britches?

Lots of news and opinion coverage over Christmas has been given to the story of the Catholic priest and his hover-board, who got himself suspended.

Actually, he's a drop in the bucket when it comes to liturgical abuse which cries out to heaven to be confronted by legitimate authority, assigning these men a "time out" to reflect on the gravity of the stunts they have played, drawing attention to themselves and denigrating the Sacred Mysteries.

My brief point is not to scold anyone or to wring hands over the sad state the Church is in. These countless abuses (how many sacrilegious wedding mass videos of that very entertaining Italian priest are out there on YouTube!) argue something else and more for me.

If anyone is still contending, seriously, that the way forward with our liturgical malaise in the Roman Catholic Church is by way of a reform of the reformed liturgy, let him or her think again. The OF simply lends itself to abuse and as such is not reformable. The only way forward, toward a recovery of our living patrimony and solid ground for worship is restoration, is reset, such that we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again.

Mutual enrichment of the two forms is meant to melt the hardened hearts of OF intolerants. But at some point we have to move beyond safe spaces to a general recovery.

We need to pray about it more than we do. Priests, seminary staff and bishops in particular, need to look to their responsibility of gently leading the flock home to a genuine sense of the sacred, within the tradition, as a precondition for Church renewal all across the spectrum.

Enough said! Happy New Year!