This is not just any place.
This is the Holy of Holies.
This is the "table" where relics of the saints, especially martyrs are "buried"
This is the "table" where Calvary is made present again.
And this is the place where this priest decides to say "thank you" by performing a song for his parishioners.
No connection to the Mass whatsoever, but he just decides to use the Altar, like it were any kind of surface.
He used the sanctuary, like it were his own stage.
How do you expect people to respect the church, to genuflect when entering or leaving the church, to sit silently when waiting for the Mass to start, when you have priests, priest of our Lord Jesus Christ, acting as if there is nothing special, nothing holy about the place.
Did Christ treat the Temple like this during His days on earth?
If you are so itching to do that thank you song number, Fr. Zabala, why not do it in a stage outside your parish church? Why do it in the sanctuary, and on the altar????
Why??? WHY???
Based on my experience, priests who make the Mass "customized" according to their taste, make the Mass more "fun" and "active", usually have "underlying" issues if you know what I mean. One priest is actually now banned in our parish because he had a very serious case. When he says mass, it's not like the Mass. It's like being in a pseudo-Christian "gathering of friends-we-love-each-other" meeting.
ReplyDeleteAs mere altar servers, what we would just do is to act normally: ignore Father whenever he says "clap! hug the person beside you" genuflecting and receiving the Lord in out tongue, kneeling!
For a year I prayed that the Lord may teach the priest to have a sense of the sacred. I even sprinkled exorcised salt in the chapel. Now he's not allowed here :) But I still pray for him.
Obviously, they played because there was an audience. Would they do this if there was no one to watch? Sad how the Mass has become entertainment. Even sadder how even priests have this notion of the Mass as being entertainment for an "audience" that they have to perform for. Sad how narcissistic priests have become! Turn around, face the Lord, offer Him that Holy Sacrifice and reparation!
ReplyDeleteLasallian, while I will partially agree with you, indeed, there really are exceptional times when the status of priestly life sometimes manifest itself in the way the priest celebrates the liturgy.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that we have a lot of this extra-rubrical aberrations and innovations injected into the liturgy that makes it less-and-less common and uniform for the ritus novus ordo.
I have already cited this in a separate posting. You can check them out at:
http://thepinoycatholic.blogspot.com/2013/09/anomalies-in-novus-ordo.html#comment-formhttp://thepinoycatholic.blogspot.com/2013/09/anomalies-in-novus-ordo.html#comment-form.
You are right to have pointed out that so many priests have themselves lost the sense of Sacrifice and had rather imbued the notion that the Mass was a mere get-together, a gathering, a meal.
Up to now, I still cringe and feel out of place when I hear the priest rouse the congregation to clap saying: "Purihin natin ang Panginoon!" or everytime he invites approval from the crowd during his homily by saying, like a Protestant televangelist: AMEN??? Wow, am I in a protestant service?
This seemingly immaterial, intagible acquisition of non-Catholic actuations in the Liturgy has PAINLESSLY eroded our sense of the Sacred. Instead of attending the Mass with the intention of Offering to the Father the Eternal Sacrifice of Christ - together with our thanksgivings and joys, with our sufferings, with our success and failures - so many Catholics now come to mass in order to get what they think they should get from it, i.e. good music, entertaining choreography, tickling homily, and short service with lesser kneeling and reverencing.
And surely, priests like this using the Altar for non-liturgical purposes demeans [to common tao] the sacrality of that Sacred Table on which the Bishop poured blessed olive oil to consecrate it with a relic of a saint or martyr in it. Methinks the Church should bring back the altar railings to demarcate that only ordained ministers and allowed altar boys can stray into the sanctuary to offer mass, not to play the guitar and entertain the congregation.