By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
We are now making things up as we go along. As if the Church had been founded yesterday. This nonsense was already tried in the sixties and found wanting.
Paolo Ruffini reported on Twitter that at a press conference for the 2018 Youth Synod now underway in Rome a speaker called for “a liturgy that is better suited to present times, more participatory, more understandable, otherwise the youth might consider it dull.”
Dull! Heaven forbid! Let’s bring back the guitars and tambourines! Everybody who can play an instrument should bring theirs and we can have a talent show. The resulting laughter at least will ensure a scarcity of boredom.
The problem with this approach is that young people do not come to the discussion with a tabula rasa as they might have in the past. They do not believe the Church was founded yesterday. Social networks, the Internet, and other factors make young people today more knowledgeable about our tradition. All the books that were thrown away or left on the shelves, even when I was in the seminary, are all being made available on the Internet. Young people are meeting other young people on social networks and inviting each other to attend and learn the Traditional Liturgy.
The Latin texts were left on the shelf. Those priests who did know Latin decided that we who were not yet priests did not need Latin so chose not to teach us. We lobbied to get one semester of Latin. The course was thereafter discontinued and that was the end of Latin for men in formation to offer the Holy Mass, the use of Latin in which was called for by Vatican II documents.
From the beginning of my priesthood whenever I offered Mass alone, I exclusively used the Latin texts. I was all the more ready to learn the Traditional Latin Mass in 2010 when assigned as pastor at St. Francis de Sales in Benedict, Md., where the old Mass has been available on Sundays since John Paul II’s Ecclesia Dei gave permission for its recovery in limited cases.
Men studying for, and discerning, the priesthood show a consistent interest in the Traditional Liturgy. For example, a young man no longer attends Mass with his family about 20 miles distant and has chosen instead to attend our Latin Mass consistently on Sundays, recently joining the parish. He has informed me that he is discerning the priesthood.
Our parish has also this month sent a young man to discern his vocation over a three-week stay with an order that exclusively offers the Traditional Liturgy.
We have additional potential religious vocations in the parish pipeline. Our altar server society encourages all the young men involved to consider the priesthood. One of our senior servers is planning to apply to a Traditional order for seminary. A young lady looks forward to a discernment visit with a Traditional order in Missouri.
Rome, deaf to this phenomenon that we hear of in so many places, continues to peddle the tried and failed ruses of the postconciliar period where the only methods not used were the Traditional ones, in flagrant violation of the Vatican II documents themselves.
Young people can go to any group today and find a self-celebratory, homemade liturgy or celebration that serves as a projection of self. They come to the Church to find Christ. The Church owes all persons the honesty of recognizing and that the liturgy did not come down to us as a multiple choice smorgasbord. Rather, the revelation of Christ through the Spirit is a one-size-fits-all source of grace. Only God can satisfy all the longings of the human heart. God comes only through the integral means established by Christ handed down as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Either those in Rome the Pope invites to churn out new documents about liturgy will listen to young people and learn — or young people will simply ignore the documents coming from Rome and continue to study and learn the old Missals and Kyriales.
True joy is never boring. Neither is the drama and love of the cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ which we touch and enter through the Holy Mass. I am very blessed and joyful to pray the Traditional Latin Mass, a liturgy that is timeless instead of “keeping up with the times.”
The LGBT network is also present at the synod with official approbation. These recruiters encourage young people to label themselves not as Christian believers but rather to add the LGBT qualifier which undermines that very identity with a subversive and heretical agenda.
Avera Maria Santo is a 22-year-old U.S. Catholic who lives in Alabama and blogs at her website, “Inside My Holy of Holies,” about being same-sex attracted and remaining faithful to the goodness, truth, and beauty of what the Church teaches about human sexuality.
In an open letter circulated in Rome to the bishops participating in the October 3-28 Youth Synod, Santo told them she had been “devastated” to learn of the ongoing campaign by pro-“LGBT” groups that are trying to utilize the synod as a vehicle to shift Church teaching on homosexuality.
She wrote: “I wish then to lay my heart bare, and to share some of my story and my convictions with you, dear bishops of the Holy Catholic Church, and plead with you to keep the Church’s teachings on homosexuality good, true and beautiful.”
These are the kinds of young people that should have been invited to the synod, not LGBT advocates. See “Pope Selects Youth From Pro-Gay Vatican Consultant’s Media Org To Attend Synod” in LifeSiteNews.com, October 8.
Another rigged Synod is now underway with predictable results. All we need to know to verify that is the information that Archbishop Bruno Forte is on the drafting committee again for this confab. He is responsible for inserting pro-LGBT propaganda in the written record of the earlier Family Synod.
Lorenzo Cardinal Baldisseri says the drafts of the final document of Synod 2018 will be kept confidential and will not be published. What has been made public thus far indicates that the synod counts on another ruse to manipulate Church teaching for ill purposes.
Pleas to stop the synod in order to give room for a response to Archbishop Viganò and to deal with the homosexual scandals were ignored. Perhaps a pre-planned useful distraction like the Youth Synod was an opportunity to good to pass up.
As the men in Rome act like a self-protective group carrying on a closed discussion, they will not frustrate the work of the Holy Spirit speaking through so many sincere young Catholics all over the world who are doing the work of genuinely evangelizing other youth.
Please pray for our group of pilgrims journeying to the holy places in Italy as you read this.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. @MCITLFrAphorism
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