Monday, May 29, 2006

Obedient to God or Man?



Lest you fear that priests are no longer preaching about mortal sin. Let me reassure you.

Fr. Tran:

Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran's anti-kneeling edict.


But the parishoners say:

Kneeling is an act of adoration. You almost automatically kneel because you're so used to it. Now the priest says we should stand, but we all just ignore him.

Judith M. Clark, 68

The Experts who you can always count on to get it wrong:

Because the earliest Christians viewed Jesus as God and man, Madden said, they generally stood during worship services to show reverence and equality. About the 7th century, however, Catholic theologians put more emphasis on Christ's divinity and introduced kneeling as the only appropriate posture at points in the Mass when God was believed to be present.

Things started to change in the 1960s, Madden said, when Vatican II began moving the church back to its earliest roots. What has ensued, he said, is the predictable struggle of an institution revising centuries of religious practices.


The heresy of antiquarianism trotted out so predictably to justify destroying people's faith.

I'm waiting for this one to go all the way to Rome.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This controvesity about kneeling is not just in the USA. It is reccuring all over especially here in Ireland. Here ia a great quote used in our Catholic newspaper rebuting the "reverence is standing crowd." Maybe we can send it to the priest... "It may be well that kneeling is alien to moderne culture-insofar as it is a culture-for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer knows the One before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture. The man who learns to believe, learns to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling is sick at the core. Where lost, kneeling must be rediscovered..." The Spirit of the Liturgy Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger page 194

Madeline said...

Isn't it amazing that Catholics may "follow their conscience" in everything but reverence?

Thomas Coolberth said...

It is said that Satan does not kneel as he has no knees.