Still Running Off at the Keyboard

CHANGING THE STRUCTURE OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM

The church I attended last Sunday had fliers enclosed in the bulletin. One of them concerned the arrangements for getting the youth group to The FEST by bus in cooperation with another parish. This flyer was addressed to "Youth, Adults (young, old and in between) and Families." It isn't clear whether the bus is for everyone or for youth groups from both parishes. In any case the flyer directed the reader to www.a-full-life.com which appears to be a recruitment ad for the seminary where The FEST is being held.

Then there is the Vibrant Parish Life II flyer titled "What's the Local Church?" which presents three true or false propositions, together with an analysis of the answers they presume the laity has given:

The basic unit of the Catholic Church is the parish.
My local church is our parish.
A diocese is a regional office of the Roman Catholic Church, which is headquartered in Rome.

If you are like most Catholics, you answered "true" to all three statements. But all three statements are false. In the Catholic Church, the basic unit is the diocese, not the parish. In Catholic theology and terminology, "the local church" means "the diocese." And far from being a "branch office," each diocese is properly called a "church". (emphasis in original)

Well, at least they didn't capitalize it. The rest of the 2-sided flyer elaborates on that theme, starting with the Early Church and moving forward with an argument for the diocese being the area of focus rather than the parish. Near the end there is a drawing of the Church organization they are proposing--a large oval with a small oval in the center where the word ROME appears in bold letters. Surrounding the ROME oval are many more ovals with diocese names in them, such as Sofia, Dubrovnik, Prague, Washington, Kingston, Los Angeles, Madrid, Chicago, New York, and more, including of course Cleveland. Strangely enough those are the only American cities included in this drawing--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and Cleveland. I didn't see Lincoln (Bruskewitz), for example. Nor Denver (Chaput). Sydney (Pell) didn't make the list either, though Perth did. And Vienna.

The brochure closes with a request that all of the church members in the Diocese of Cleveland come together like family to support each other. In other words this is propaganda to get us ready for closed parishes. Oh joy.

Interestingly enough, FutureChurch talks about parishes closing and merging on their website as well. There you can read:

In the past 20 years, bishops in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Albany, Seattle, Baltimore and Los Angeles have issued pastoral documents aimed at preserving viable parish communities rather than close or merge parishes. (Once again we are given a curious list of parishes which places Cleveland among the liberals. This is not a list an orthodox Catholic delights in seeing their diocese a part of.--ct) They chose creative solutions permitted by canon law, such as entrusting the pastoral care of several parishes to one priest, to a team of priests, or to competent lay ecclesial ministers, deacons and religious, with a nonresident priest serving as the canonical pastor.

Once again the list of dioceses doesn't include Lincoln or Denver. Maybe that's because their seminaries aren't empty and they don't have a priest shortage. And we know why, don't we?

Moving on...FutureChurch presents a link to Vibrant Parish Life in the Cleveland Diocesan website under the heading "Discerning An Appropriate Response" in the FutureChurch website. They offer guidance if the parish under threat of closure wants to protest. They link the Cleveland Diocesan/Vibrant Parish Life website under "Organizing a Prayer Vigil or Service" as well. There you will find talk about a canonical appeal even to the Apostolic Signatura, and a 24-hour prayer vigil, making me wonder how involved FutureChurch will be in whatever protests may develop in the Cleveland Diocese over parish closings, and also making me wonder if there is some sort of cooperation between FutureChurch and the Cleveland Diocesan program Vibrant Parish Life. Obviously protests are devisive, though the protests would tend to serve orthodoxy if the churches to be closed are of the old cruciform construction and those to remain open are of the newer circular or semi-circular construction.

My introduction to Vibrant Parish Life in my parish occurred on the Sunday following our weekend for Eucharistic adoration that we have every fall--essentially 40 hours devotion--when the Euchrist is displayed in a monstrance on the altar. At the moment I can't remember the official name for this event, but it is well-publicized and long-standing. The Sunday following this Eucharistic event when I arrived at Mass, there was the Vibrant Parish Life "monstrance" logo attached to the front of the altar cloth, bringing immediately to mind the monstrance that had resided just inches away the previous Sunday. It looked at the time somewhat like that strange symbol attached to the front of the altar at The Hidden Chapel of Mary Magdalene which I linked yesterday. I nearly had a heart attack. The following Sunday it was gone.

This series of connect the dots further fuels my conviction that the structure of the local church is being morphed into something a pre-Vatican II Catholic would not recognize. Is a mega-church slated for the Ceveland diocese? Will it resemble the Celebration Church as it seems to be doing in Fond du Lac? Will it resemble something Catholic?

What should one make of the fact that the heretical FutureChurch was left to operate out of a diocesan parish until just recently, when one discovers that FutureChurch is promoting protests over parish closings, and linking the Diocesan website to do it? Are the protests part of the engineered process? They do create a kind of chaos--out of which something new can be born?

If the churches that are closed are the ones whose interior confirms Catholic faith, and the churches that are allowed to remain open are the churches that express a universal faith denuded of Catholic symbolism, I guess we know that the church closings are part of an engineered process. As Michael Rose says:

Church buildings, as we know, play a key role in creating an atmosphere conducive to worship. If this atmosphere clashes with the mood that liturgists and so-called experts wish to produce, something has to give. (THE RENOVATION MANIPULATION, p. ii)

The churches that are large enough to house a combined congregation are the churches that have departed from the cruciform, for the most part. As Rose further states:

The Council of Trent called for a return to the cruciform basilica plan of the early Church, since that model was understood to be most conducive to the catechesis and preaching it considered essential to battling the various heresies of the day. (ibid. p. 1)

So of course if you didn't want to battle the heresies of the day, you would not want to use the cruciform. Today we have the same old heresies surrounding us and seeping in. The cruciform churches are older and thus require more money to maintain them. And as I keep seeing at my parish, those $-signs are being used to suggest that the parish is not "vibrant" because we can no longer afford the upkeep.

The reason our church interiors contain so many symbols of the faith is that our ancestors were illiterate, and so the symbols conveyed the faith to them. Symbols still do that unless they are symbols of a different faith. When the symbols are incomprehensible, we must hold on to a suspicion that they convey a different faith.

In the Celebration Church the crown that can be a symbol of Christ the King has become a crown that represents the religion of man. The change is subtle. What would have been a depiction of a jewel--a circle suspended above the base--has become the head of a person doing the celebrating. That subtle change represents a paradigm shift in thinking from God-centered to man-centered religion. Symbols are that important.

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UPDATE

Up above I've mentioned a flyer in last Sunday's bulletin titled "What's the Local Church?" in which a drawing rendering the structure of the church is depicted, with an oval in the center marked ROME and multiple ovals surrounding it.

It happens that in the same website which offers that odd "monstrance" on the front of the altar at The Hidden Chapel of Mary Magdalene" which reminded me of the "monstrance" in the Vibrant Parish Life logo, there is another webpage with a picture of a temple-room here. (Scroll way down 3/4ths of the way for this picture.) The picture appears under the "ANTAHKARANA-BUILDING EMPOWERMENT" heading. Look at the floor of the temple and you will know what these ovals in the parish bulletin look like. Imagine drawing a large oval on the floor that encompasses many of these small ovals.

Antahkarana is Alice Bailey's rainbow bridge over which the initiate "walks" in order to contact the spirit world.