PRIESTS, PROFESSIONS AND PROCESSIONS

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Bad Bishops, Bad Popes was a post that got people going - onto the streets outside Hastings Hospital on its killing days and into the Square in Palmerston North, searching for bishops and/or priests.

'Anonymous ' said:

Our Bishop Drennan is a man who takes to the street.  He marched around the Square with a mostly rag-tag group of lefties at the protest on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.  He even addressed the crowd.  

It seems TPP was an appropriate Catholic issue to demand his presence. Murdering unborn children gets only token attention from the Catholic hierarchy, and certainly no street marching these days.  

I don't see much on international trade agreements in Sacred Scripture, but there is much on the sanctity of life. Oh well.

Bob Gill said:

But if Bishop Charles Drennan were to stand on that footpath outside Hastings Hospital, I wonder if he, like Father Bryan Buenger when he left New Zealand last week, would proudly be wearing his clerical collar in public?

And I said: 

My first cousin Brian Quin SM (RIP) - of whom I am quite 'ordinately' proud - always wore a clerical collar. He was a holy priest.

It all made me think about priests in public, professing their faith and witnessing to Christ. Here's what Pope Benedict had to say on the subject, in a homily in 2013 on the feast of what Catholics now regrettably know (or mostly don't) as the Body and Blood of Christ:

"The sacred has an educational function and its disappearance inevitably impoverishes culture and especially the formation of the new generations. If, for example, in the name of a faith that is secularized and no longer in need of sacred signs, Corpus Christi processions were to be abolished, our spiritual profile would be 'flattened out', and our personal and community awareness would be weakened." 

Corpus Christi processions abolished? Can anyone remember a Corpus Christi procession in New Zealand, ever? 

Pope Benedict is talking about public processions down city streets, not just coyly following Father out one door of the church and around to the other, hoping passersby won't notice. They still have them in Europe: I was amazingly privileged to march alongside a cardinal through the streets of Avila in Spain following not the Eucharist but a gorgeously attired and beflowered St Teresa, with thousands of lay and clerics dressed to the nines accompanied by bands, dancers, strings and pipes making a glorious din.

Oh, but this is New Zealand. That's not the Kiwi way. We do things differently here.

Pope Benedict is something of a prophet, obviously. Because in New Zealand, "in the name of a faith that is secularized and no longer in need of sacred signs, Corpus Christi processions" have been "abolished, our spiritual profile" is indeed " 'flattened out' ".

Consequently - and paradoxically, given that "community" is something of an idol in the Church of Nice - our community awareness is weakened. That's why Father thinks he has to keep banging on about it.

Just as a reminder, here's a blast from the past - a brief excerpt from my novel The Age for Love*, ($US2.99 from amazon.com) describing a Christ the King procession at a certain Catholic boarding school in New Zealand, circa 1960:

           "Snowballs, the girls call them. They pick the white globes of blossom in the nuns’ garden on the only day of the year they're allowed in, the eve of Christ the King. 

Next morning, on their knees down on the green, they pull the petals apart for a floral carpet across the grass for the priest to tread, to the outdoor altar, processing with the monstrance and the St Anthony’s altar boys behind, trampling hosts and chalices, alphas and omegas of rhododendron, camellia and lilac all washed in a tide of viburnum petals, white and shredded like Lux flakes."

But even in 1960, in New Zealand such processions were private affairs. Were we embarrassed to be seen in public following a priest carrying a monstrance? And how much more would we be embarrassed by it now?

Bob Gill: There was no embarrassment the other day in the streets of Portland, Oregon: https://catholicsentinel.org/.../WATCH-Jesus.../2/35/38074

Philippa O'Neill Nooòoo... we want more.
Adelie Reid I have twice walked in public processions with the monstrance here in New Zealand and both this century.


I say:
Thanks Adelie. Where was it that you walked in  public processions in NZ?