A PRIEST'S TOLD OFF FOR ASKING CHILDREN TO KNEEL

What possible reason could a parish priest of the Palmerton North Diocese have for reprimanding a junior priest who asked First Holy Communicants to kneel to receive the Sacrament? The children duly knelt and received, but their pastor got told off.

The incident perfectly illustrates the abolition of 'fear of the Lord' from this diocese's official list of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Obviously its replacement - 'awe and reverence' - isn't enough to impel us to kneel in the presence of the Lord God Almighty. You can see that at Mass in the cathedral, where almost everyone stands or even sits during the Consecration.

I've been told off, too. 

The Scriptural 'fear of the Lord ' - which must have been shut up in a drawer somewhere in the Catholic Church and forgotten while cardinals and other clerics have got on with their heinous behavior - I'm told is 'terrible'. It's 'terrible' to fear God.

Okay, my interlocutor was brought up nicely, as an Anglican. In a local ecumenical group who meet to choose Scripture verses for the local rag I've learned (if I didn't know already) that the fear of God doesn't sit well with niceness. 

That's one of the reasons for its deletion from our diocesan list of the gifts of the Spirit: the Catholic Church here and in the US now rivals the Anglican, as the 'Church of Nice'.

May I point out how children are taught to cross the road? They're told to look right then left then right again, and walk, not run, straight across the road. No jay-walking. 

And why are they taught thus? Because they and their parents and teachers fear the traffic. They want children to fear traffic too. And why should they fear the traffic? Because they might get run over and killed.

Just like a grown-up who doesn't fear God might die and go to hell - like most people, according to all the saints.

That's called servile fear. It's a good starting point. At St Joseph's convent school in Waipukurau the 'Black Joes' taught me to fear the Yellow Peril even more than God, but I was sometimes afraid to go to sleep at night, in case I didn't wake up. It wasn't a great feeling, but that servile fear of punishment, of hell, probably kept me out of a lot of trouble. And slowly I learned that I was in fact being kept out of trouble, by God. 

Slowly, I learned the filial fear of God which fears nothing but sin, which separates me from the God I've learned to love:

"Come, children, hearken to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord" (Ps 33:12): according to Fr Gabriel of S Mary Magdalen OCD, author of that spiritual classic, Divine Intimacy, "this is the first lesson the divine Paraclete teaches the soul desiring to become a saint".