By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
One of our local priests has fallen happily into the role of a convener of sorts in support of the social fraternity of other priests. He will text various priests with an invitation on Saturdays and Sundays for either of two locations and rotates the events, to encourage greater participation, one in the northern and the other in the southern end of our tri-county region.
As I approach my 60s, I’ve grown to minimize time in the car, especially as I must travel regularly to help care for my parents. I know I will have to drive every other week to reach them and increasingly appreciate the time at home in the rectory otherwise.
One becomes more philosophical with increased life experience, content with quiet and alone time in the knowledge that business and company will come eventually, obviating and making more precious what cannot be had then at any price. My cat Pippo is pretty good company most of the time.
Our parish is still growing and getting busier. Increasing numbers of parents want to protect their children from the ravages of what’s left of the postconciliar liturgy and its attendant abuses. One pastor may come in and clean up, but then another replaces him and returns this most sacred treasure back into an unserious carnival.
I rarely attend the priest social dinners, but don’t want to make what would surely be the mistake of never attending at all. I responded yes to the invite for a casual priest dinner at a pizza place on a recent Saturday night. I’m not supposed to be eating pizza anymore, but one makes small sacrifices for the sake of others. Aging intensifies the process of detachment.
Conversation ranged over a number of issues that you would imagine face parish priests on a weekly basis.
One priest related the story of providing Confessions for Neo-Catechumenal Catholics, one of the post-Vatican II groups that McCarrick brought into the diocese and which just happened to bulk up his attention-getting vocational numbers.
The priest scheduled to provide Mass that day did not show up, so the above-mentioned priest was then also asked to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice for the group. He happily agreed but then proceeded to make the mistake of following the rubrics. You see, some of these new groups define their charism demonstrating their life in the Holy Spirit by means of liturgical error, if you can believe it.
Father gave himself Communion first, as the rubrics dictate, without waiting for everyone to have the Host in their hand and receive together with him as is the “custom” in the “Neo-Catechumenal” Mass. Absolutely incredible that we have arrived at the point at which putative Catholics define themselves as alive in the Holy Spirit, have a charism, by means of not following the rubrics.
The Traditional Latin Mass is more impervious to abuse, prescribing as it does in great detail the words and actions of the priest, rendering his individuality and personality secondary in importance to the business at hand of the Lord who offers Himself in the perfect Sacrifice.
Did the Holy Spirit only just arrive in 1962? Many seem to think the Church was able to function without Him in the nearly two thousand years prior to the advent of the Second Vatican Council. Does this not summarize the argument against the Traditional rites, above all the Mass handed down in that period and now described as the Traditional Latin Mass?
I was baptized in July of that first year of the Council and thankful that I received the laver of new life under the Traditional rite, confident that the Lord was perfectly capable of giving the Spirit at the first Pentecost as the Church and the Scriptures teach.
As our parish grows we are once again giving this first Sacrament of Initiation under the Traditional form. It is a truly beautiful and instructional pedagogy in the economy of salvation.
The McCarrick Report and his dismissal — not following the normal procedures which brushed the messiness of courtroom procedures and publicity under the rug — also came up. The report continues the obfuscation, even in contradistinction to the evidence available in the report’s own footnotes.
We discussed dwindling numbers at Saturday evening Mass. That’s the crowd that tends to be the least likely to confess regularly and also least likely to attend Mass at Easter.
The popularity of the Saturday vigil Mass runs into a problem every year when we follow the rules on the night of the Pasch and begin after dark. The liturgy also runs longer than usual, which is problem number two. So, the Saturday vigil aficionados choose not to go that evening. Some fail to attend Mass at all the following morning because a family Easter event gets in the way.
The Saturday vigil was originally intended for cases where a member of the faithful is unable to attend Sunday Mass through no fault of his own. If one is sick, one is not obligated to attend at all, of course.
Our most militant never-on-a-Sunday Catholics haven’t been seen at Mass since last March with the first COVID scare. I wonder if I will ever see them again.
A faith for which we will not exert or inconvenience ourselves is not one for the sake of which we will die. Many of my Saturday evening customers have already switched over to Sunday as I have preached the Gospel to them and they have responded accordingly.
In a time of great scandal and corruption as this in which we now live the first order of business for all of us, priests and people, is an examination first of our own living of the Gospel.
We certainly desire to help purify and sanctify the Church, but we cannot give what we do not have. Just as on a plane, where we are instructed in the event of emergency to put on our own oxygen masks first before we turn to help others, so must we do in the life of grace.
The priest can serve as a convener for the fraternity of the parish just as the local priest I described does for his brothers. We are stronger in Christ as we act on the love we are to have for one another.
Our parish community comes together for lunch at the hall each Sunday. No one is ever without company who desires it. Is that not what every Christian and Catholic parish is called to make possible?
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. Join me for further conversation on Parler, the new free speech social network, where you’ll find me @FatherKevinMCusick
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress