A recent blog post entitled, Losing my religion, by Mary DeTurris Poust, who is a Catholic writer and the wife of Dennis Poust, the Communications Director of the New York State Catholic Conference, is garnering a lot of attention. (See posts by Deacon Greg Kandra and Rod Dreher, for example.)
To get right to the point of her post, Mary DeTurris Poust is spiritually hungry, starving even, and in my view, it’s not her fault. Not by a long shot.
“I almost walked out of Mass in the middle last night,” Ms. Poust begins, and not just over some isolated issue in one specific parish, but rather due to what she called, “a universal problem, as in Universal Church.”
She explains: (I’ll paraphrase; you can read the rest there.)
It wasn’t that the priest was preaching heresy … It was the overwhelming, long-building, near-constant feeling that my Church really doesn’t care enough to try to feed me spiritually, that the Church is daring Catholics to leave…
You get a Gospel like we had this Sunday – “No one can serve two masters…You cannot serve both God and money.” – and you choose to drone on for 20 minutes about temperance and prudence and fortitude and justice in a disjointed, monotone, utterly incomprehensible way? I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to do better than that…
I think every Catholic who is sitting in church week after week wondering, Why? Why? WHY? … should walk out every single time they are insulted by or condescended to or lied to by someone on the altar until something starts to change, until Pope Francis’ challenge begins to take shape before our eyes, not just in beautiful words spoken by a courageous man.
Though it is clear from her words that she is unable at present to recognize as much, Mary is but one of countless millions of victims of the post-conciliar epidemic wherein sincere Catholics who long for all that the Lord wishes to give have unwittingly contracted, in some considerable measure, a protestant understanding of Christianity.
And how did Mary get exposed to this dreadful spiritual disease?
From making the terrible mistake of innocently buying far too much of what the sacred pastors of the Church, including the Supreme Pastors who have occupied the Chair of St. Peter over the last fifty years, were selling.
To be more specific, all indications are that Ms. Poust seems to have ingested – hook, line and sinker – the failed post-conciliar liturgical view of the Mass as little more than the Catholic version of the protestant praise and worship service.
Again, it’s not her fault. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as it existed for more than a thousand years in the Roman Rite, was deliberately sliced and diced and repackaged to resemble as closely as possible the anthropocentric Sunday service of the heretics, wherein hearing some Scripture and a meaningful sermon, along with a dash of fellowship and a call to action, is all anyone can or should expect.
Now, that’s not to say that those who have embraced, even in innocence, this protestantized view of the liturgy are overlooking the centrality of the Eucharist.
Mary, for her part, made it clear in a follow-up post that the Eucharist is the only reason she hasn’t run for the hills already, and that’s good to know, but here’s the crux of the matter:
While it is absolutely right to look to the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church, and her sacred pastors, to quote Ms. Poust, “for someone who wants to meet me in my darkness and walk with me spiritually,” and to exclaim as she did, “I cannot put up with parishes that do not even attempt to lead spiritually, that do not care what their people need,” it is a flawed view indeed to imagine that such provisions are primarily delivered by means of the sacred liturgy.
In other words, it is not the nature of Holy Mass to provide spiritual guidance, or even just a decent homily (which, after all, is optional at daily Mass for a reason.)
For those who suffer from this post-conciliar, quasi-protestant, liturgical myopia, the ideal Mass would presumably be one in which the music, the readings, the fellowship, the ceremonial actions, the priest’s persona and the homily all engage and speak, in some considerable measure, to one’s spiritual needs in a personal and profound way, accompanied, of course, by the “source and summit” that is the Holy Eucharist.
This describes, of course, nothing other than the praise and worship services of the heretics, albeit with the addition of the Eucharist which is (inadvertently, to be sure) reduced to something akin to a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae.
I don’t know Mary, but my sense is that she is being moved in her unrest by the Lord Himself, He who literally died to give us so much more than is made readily available to the faithful in the overwhelming majority of places amid the realities of Catholic life circa 2013.
It appears as if Mary does indeed understand that the malady runs far deeper than just banal liturgy.
“As I tried to get across in yesterday’s post, my discontent with my current church experience is not based on a single homily or even a series of homilies or homilies in general; it’s based on the whole package,” she wrote in her follow-up.
The whole package indeed.
If I could make a suggestion to Mary, and to all who identify with her struggle, it would be this:
The urge to run is a call from God. Yes, run like Peter and John to find the Risen Christ, but do not be deceived into imagining that He, or any meaningful refuge, can be found anywhere other than in the faith that comes to us from the Apostles. No, not the utterly dissatisfying, repackaged, version born in the 1960’s, but in the rich spirituality, immutable magisterium, and timeless liturgy that predated the Second Vatican Council, the same that admirably nurtured Catholics just like you and me for many centuries on end.
Sure, our circumstances are different from those who lived in ages past, but Our Blessed Lord has not changed even one iota, and His voice rings out over the centuries with a clarity unheard in recent decades, and it can dispel the confusion and unrest that plague so many in our day.
No, it won’t be easy; not in the least, but then again nothing worth a wooden nickel is. Nor will it be without pain.
It’s going to be a bitter experience indeed to come face-to-face with the unavoidable conclusion that your rich Catholic inheritance has been stolen, and that every pope who has reigned for the last sixty-plus years has contributed, either in what he has done or in what he has failed to do, to the bitter spiritual anguish that you’re now experiencing.
The reward, however, is priceless; namely, the unshakeable knowledge that the Lord provides for our every spiritual need, without fail, through His Holy Catholic Church alone, even when, in ages like our own, He allows weak and sinful human shepherds to mislead His little ones.
I drive nearly 100 miles to the nearest Old Mass, having a particularly awful version anywhere closer. God revealed beauty to me in a special way even as a young child. New Mass, as it is “clebrated” in this diocese is not only banal, it is ugly. Ugly dress, ugly noise before and after (except when praying the Rosary, thank God) ugly music from the 1960’s, ugly announcements telling us where we are and what we are doing here, who our “main celebrant” is and all about Bob and Nancy reading scripture and taking up collection. And hardly an ugly guy in his golfing outfit on non-Sundays. Sundays a flock of teenage girls in white robes as altar “servers” along with civilians doling out communiion as if the priest’s arms would wear out in the ten minutes or
….I ran outside the space given here. Suffice it to say the whole thing is ugly, including selling Girl Scout cookies and designing a new “church” that looks less like one than most of 100 old frame Baptists worship houses in the surrounding countryside. Ugly!
Excellent analysis. I wanted to send her a response that she should go to the old mass and read the old books, but I knew the response would be: “Same old trads, same old broken record.” Some young bishops get it despite the recent “regime change”. My new bishop will be celebrating a missa cantata in two weeks, and I can’t wait to go!
One other thought. I attended an evangelical church for a while, and it was intellectually, artistically and socially rich. Everything the average parish in the West is not. It had those things because it was not a big tent church, but everyone shared the same broad worldview/culture.
Fantastic analysis; really, you restated in a far more expansive and accurate way what I’ve been saying for days since the story broke. If could suggest something to her, it would be to flee for her life to either a traditional Latin Mass, or one of the Divine Liturgies of the East. Anything canonically licit that has its roots in the ancient Church is far better than the poisonous spirituality that she’s getting in her parish.
I love the title: when God says run.
Louie,
I couldn’t agree more and as others of have mentioned these types typically get angry if you suggest the Mass of the Saints to them. It is sad how low the average parish has fallen. The old saying “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi” is so apropos here. People always seem to drop the last clause here as well. With a banal anthropocentric creation, as Pope Benedict as called it, it is no wonder that the belief that the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is seen as nothing much more that a praise and worship with a snack and drink. Maybe they understand the Eucharist, but studies have shown most don’t discern what they are doing there.
The how we worship, is how we believe leads to how we live, the Lex Vivendi portion. What do we see? Catholics contracept, abort, fornicate, and masturbate at or above the levels of the average person. They support sodomitical marriage at higher rates. The leadership chastises good, faithful, traditional Catholics while courting the praise and adulation of those who, in power, consistently act against the teachings of Holy Mother Church.
Our Blessed Lord said we would no it by its fruits, that a good tree would produce good fruit and an evil tree, evil fruit. That a good tree could not produce evil fruit and that an evil tree could not produce good fruit. I would say that the Council of the Modernists has shown us the fruit which it has produced since it closed in 1965, and that fruit is rotten. Yet, this Pontiff and all the preceded him since the Council have repeatedly tried to tell me that this rotten fruit is a choice crop, a bumper crop. This “let them eat cake” attitude has cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions of souls, falling like snow into the bowels of hell. May God have mercy on their souls and ours as well.
Notice the narcissism embedded in Mary’s analysis, as if the Mass were primarily about her rather than giving glory to God. Such are the fruits of the Hippie Council.
Yes, Mary, flee the Novus Ordo service. Embrace the Catholic Mass. Only when you lose yourself might you find yourself.