A FLOWER STAND WEARS THE VESTMENTS WHILE FATHER 'NARRATES' THE EUCHARIST

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It was bizarre. 

Yesterday morning at the First Holy Communion Mass on the Feast of Christ the King, it was probably not the little girls bedecked becomingly as brides of Christ, but rather an extremely beauteous chasuble and cope, that was the cynosure of all eyes.

Only these sacred vestments were not worn by Father. They were draped around a flower stand in the sanctuary. 

By comparison, Father's post-Vat II vestments looked mundane. The old chasuble, its cope lovingly and meticulously hand-embroidered by nuns (probably in the convent next door now inhabited by a 2nd-hand car salesman), is a legacy of the 50s, that serene period of NZ Church history when new churches were built up and down the country - and not too bad aesthetically, at that - our church among them. 

"Man's nature is such that he needs external helps to assist him in fixing his attention on sacred things. we are all impressed to a remarkable degree by 'pomp and circumstance'.  A king on his throne, clad in his royal robes, holding his scepter and wearing his jeweled crown, is an imposing sight; all these accessories indicate his dignity and help us to realize his greatness. The same king without these trappings of royalty would possibly be a very insignificant object" - The Externals of the Catholic Church, John F Sullivan. 

Precisely. As sacramentals, "vestments are the uniform of the priest when he is exercising the functions of his ministry and using the sacred power he received at his ordination" - http://www.awakentoprayer.org/vestments.htm

More importantly, the chasuble and cope are sacramentals, blessed incidentally in being worn by a priest consecrated as an alter Christus to the service of God, and ceremoniously by the Church to increase devotion in those who see them and those who use them. A priest wears vestments, not  civvies, to show that he is acting not on his own authority but Christ's, in persona Christi (in the person of Christ). 

The chasuble represents the yoke of Christ, the joys and sorrows of his people, which the priest bears with them and for them. 

Above all, it represents charity, as put on over all the priest's clothing, just as we are to put on charity (love of God) over all the other virtues. Even, believe it or not, humility! Certainly well above the false humility touted everywhere in NZ's Church of Nice, in kowtowing to Maori for example, by using Te Reo in the Mass when there are next-to no Maori in the congregation. That's not humility, that's condescension.  

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (3rd ed., 2001) - the guidebook to the Novus Ordo Mass  - states that “the character and beauty of the (church) and all its furnishings should foster devotion and show forth the holiness of the mysteries celebrated there” (n. 294). This extends to the materials used: “In selecting elements for church appointments, there should be a concern for the genuineness of things [rerum veritas] and a striving for that which will be for the instruction of the faithful and the dignity of the entire sacred place.

'Church architecture ... should highlight the unity of the furnishings of the sanctuary, such as the altar, the crucifix, the tabernacle, the ambo, and the celebrant’s chair … Special respect and care must also be given to the vestments, the furnishings, and the sacred vessels, so that by their harmonious and orderly arrangement they will foster awe for the mystery of God, manifest the unity of the faith, and strengthen devotion. [v] https://onepeterfive.com/catholic-church-look-like/

In our church, as in most Novus Ordo churches, the 'unity of the sanctuary' is expressed by the tabernacle off-side, a table in the middle, a crucifix well behind - and yesterday, by two sets of vestments, one on Father and the other on a flower stand, somewhere between crucifix and tabernacle. 

In my own parish church, where I made my First Holy Communion and where I was married, the cumulative effect of disorientation was to make me feel alienated - like a DP.  I walked out before the Gospel to drive for an hour (rather faster than I should) to St Columba's Ashhurst, arriving just in time for the Rosary that is recited before the indult Latin Mass at 12 midday.  And oh, the relief.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in Sacramentum Caritatis, states: "The liturgical vestments, the furnishings and the sacred space … The profound connection between beauty and the liturgy should make us attentive to every work of art placed at the service of the celebration.

"Liturgy is inherently linked to beauty because liturgy is (1) the radiant expression of Christ, who is the source and summit of all beauty; and (2) the sacramental re-presentation of the most beautiful event, that of Christ’s gift of self in His Paschal Mystery, thereby transforming the dark mystery of death into the radiant light of the resurrection by His love:

§  “Here the splendour of God’s glory surpasses all worldly beauty. The truest beauty is the love of God, who definitively revealed himself to us in the paschal mystery” (35).

As a result, the liturgical action must reflect its innate splendour: “Everything related to the Eucharist should be marked by beauty” (41). This is no mere aestheticism or decoration but rather

§  “the concrete way in which the truth of God’s love in Christ encounters us, attracts us and delights us, enabling us to emerge from ourselves and drawing us towards our true vocation, which is love” (35).

And yet our most beautiful, most 'royal' vestments are relegated to the sacristy cupboard, or even worse, pressed into service as mere décor, useful for hiding a plain flower stand, making it 'special'. 



In the same vein, at Mass the preceding Sunday Father was at pains to impress on the congregation the idea that all he does at the Consecration is "narrate".  As if it's just a matter of saying certain words in a certain order, like a 'Eucharistic Minister' does in a 'paraliturgy' -  so really, why shouldn't anyone be able to 'narrate' the Consecration?

Now, where does that idea - which stupefied one of his fellow priests, when informed of it - come from? Not from Father, I'll be bound. No, it sounds like it's come from someone in the NZ hierarchy with more than usual Protestant leanings and is calculated, like dumbed-down vestments, to downplay and diminish Sacred Orders and lead us on to - wait for it - the new globalist Church World Church as promoted by the Amazon Synod, facilitated by its married priests and female deacons. 

It's extremely serious in that it raises the question of whether, if Father really means that all he's doing is 'narrating' he intends actually to confect the Eucharist, which is what he's supposed to be doing, and most importantly, supposed to be intending to do - because without this 'right intention', of confecting the Eucharist, there is no Sacrament. The bread remains bread. The wine remains wine. The priest's intention must be to do what the Church requires him to do: consecrate the bread and wine.

If Father intends just to 'narrate' rather than confect the Eucharist, then his people are being fed bread and wine instead of the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It's highly unlikely that he doesn't intend to confect the Eucharist, but the statement, "I just narrate" coming from certain other priests would be highly alarming, and congregants might be justified in concluding that they've been horribly and cruelly swindled.

In the world of Novusordism we should recall the words of the pagan Aristotle concerning "the good, the true and the beautiful”: they coinhere. You can’t have truth and goodness without beauty. Novusordoists are in danger of sleepwalking towards a Church which having lost beauty will lose goodness and truth too.

Then there's my favorite quote from schooldays, from John Keats:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In other words, all we need to know is Christ, and Him crucified.

Bob Gill says:

Good to highlight priest Mass tampering as it’s something that happens so often. Getting the congregation to join hands during the Our Father; mixing blessings while distributing Communion, are examples. Then we have others there giving school presentations during a Mass –instead of after Mass; excessive hugging and shaking of hands by a bunch of lay ministers just before they distribute Communion, etc. It’s a free-for-all most of the time these days.


Philippa O'Neill says:


Oh my, check this out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GvNQMdO648



Linda Clarke says:

In reference to your comment that no one would complain of the NO if done according to the book: you did mention SSPX diehards ... .
I've read a lot in recent weeks on how Mass WAS and how Pope Pius V decreed it was never to be changed and also how rich and unchanging the Latin is ...  and then I experienced the whole atmosphere for myself … I think people wouldn't complain about the NO if done according to the book only if they didn't know the Latin Mass - didn't know the reverence, the sacrificial element.

I've become quite open to thinking that Vat II should never have altered the Mass. It has the possibility of being acceptable to Protestants etc, etc.   So I might be a gone coon where that is concerned … The NO is sooooo not like the Latin Mass, although it's all I knew. As you say - did we need it changed?!   I think not.....I don't think it was God's will.   I find the NO hard to accept now.

Jeanette Hancock says:

Christ said the gates of Hell would not prevail. Vat II and it's decision is legit. Sure, there are plenty of parishes that don't quite operate under the intended spirit of the Council, but that's a different problem.

If you read the Vat II documents, they are beautiful, and they're trying to compel a people to a closer relationship with Christ and a stronger understanding of what the Mass is.

The problem isn't so much the style of the Mass, it's the communities we're living in, and the failures of families, schools and clergy to make sure that the Faithful are properly catechised.

I say: 

Yes, Vat II and its decision is legit. But not infallible: it was only a pastoral council. "In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it has avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary manner any dogma carrying the mark of infallibility.`` --Pope Paul VI, Audience of 12 January, 1966.

Yes, I've read the Vat II documents. Yes, they sound beautiful. But you could drive a truck through the loopholes.
The problem is that the style of the Mass actually reflects the communities we're living in and is a major driver in ensuring the failure of families, schools and clergy to catechize the Faithful properly.

I'm ashamed to say I have only just now got around to finishing the Ottaviani Intervention which I should think most of our readers will be familiar with. Otherwise titled A Short Critical Study on the New Order of Mass, it's a study published in 1969 by twelve Catholic theologians who worked under the direction of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. 

Please don't rear up on your hind legs at the mention of Lefebvre, celebrated for founding the Society of St Pius X. "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them" (Mt 7:15-16). Compare the fruits of the  SSPX and its Traditional Latin Mass (Usus Antiquior) with the fruits of the Novus Ordo. 

The Ottaviani Intervention stated that:"It is evident that the Novus Ordo has no intention of presenting the faith as taught by the Council of Trent, to which, nonetheless, the Catholic conscience is bound forever. With the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, the loyal Catholic is thus faced with a most tragic alternative."

I rest my case (in the meantime).

HOW CARDINALS KANGAROO, RAMBO AND GORILLA VAMPED THE VATICAN

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 Now, I'm not asking you to join dots. That's too hard. 

I'm just saying that Cardinal George Pell, currently languishing in solitary confinement in a Melbourne jail, got there after throwing his not inconsiderable weight around the Vatican, specifically around the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA). 

In the Vatican they called him, not without affection, 'the Kangaroo Cardinal'. 

In 2014 Pope Francis had picked him, Australia's highest-ranking prelate, to be one of his nine cardinal advisors and Prefect of a new Secretariat of the Economy, to sort out the financial mess in which the Vatican was widely known to be floundering.

When I say 'widely known' I must make exception for those like the intelligent - and I'd have thought well-informed - Catholic I spoke to the other day who on this subject did a Sergeant Schultz. He knew nothing, and attributed any imputation of financial finagling in Rome to the Devil.

I suspect there are lots of good NO Catholics out there who think that re anything pertaining to the Church more than a kilometer away from the parish pump, ignorance is bliss. And I doubt that many NOs will be enlightened by what's written here. But anyway. 

Anyway: in Rome the Kangaroo Cardinal did not get on famously with everyone. Specially he did not get on with one 'Cardinal Rambo' (Cardinal Domenic Calcagno), APSA’s president from July 2011 until June 2018, so-called because of his penchant for collecting guns.

By October 2016, Cardinal Pell had ferreted out money laundering, dubious ventures in foreign bank accounts, and dopy investments. His dicastery had uncovered 94 million euros in the Secretariat for State and 1 billion euros in other dicasteries which had not been recorded in any financial statement. 

In 2015 APSA had taken it into its collective head to spend €100 million on a prestigious London property. Cardinal 'Rambo' Calcagno reportedly asked Cardinal Pell to rubber-stamp the transaction at the last minute. Cardinal Pell advised against it: there were serious questions, he said, that he wanted answered. 

Cardinal C went to the Pope; he told the Pope that APSA would lose its down payment of $4.9 million if the deal didn't get done. He got his way.

Cardinal P also opposed dipping into the Vatican’s pension fund for half the purchase price. He asked how these flash apartments would fit into the pension fund’s strategy. But the fund’s president was none other than the good Cardinal C, who wrote a letter to himself, from APSA to the fund, giving it the green light.
Meanwhile, back in Savona where he'd been bishop, Cardinal C was under investigation for embezzlement …(and we think our bishops are bad?).

Cardinal P ran into trouble also when he put his signature to a letter to the Pope from 13 cardinals opposing the suggestion, in the infamous Amoris Laetitia, that some Catholics could divorce and 'remarry'. The letter was leaked (by whom?) The Pope was angry. 

But "Jesus was tough about marriage," said Cardinal Pell, "and so am I." 

That also upset Cardinal Reinhard Marx - who heads the organisation that set the guidelines for Cardinal Pell's Secretariat. No surprise then, that Cardinal P got reined in and his plans for pooling the Vatican's assets and spend all profits on the poor stymied. 

Then there was the turf war with the Secretariat of State, which until Pope Francis created the Secretariat of the Economy and ushered in this rude, unmannered Australian to head it, had called all the shots. Cardinal P brought in PricewaterhouseCoopers to run a ruler over the finances but 4 months later Cardinal Paolo Parolin - your typical suave diplomat - very undiplomatically told all Vatican departments to stonewall - and got away with it. 

It had become clear by then that, as a source insisting on anonymity put it to a senior Catholic journalist, "there was a hub of corruption with APSA", and "highly irregular transactions" were transiting through certain banks in Lugano, Switzerland. Another anonymous source reckons APSA regarded real estate as being their own, not the Church's, and anyone who poked their nose in - even the Secretary for the Economy - as an intruder.

When Cardinal P got on to his banker chums in London, who reckoned there could be €100 million held in these foreign accounts by APSA, he asked the Pope for permission to get bank statements to prove it. The Pope said yes. 

But he never got his hands on those bank statements. By July 2017, the Kangaroo Cardinal had gone to ground, preparing to fight sex abuse charges in  Australia. 

The Vatican spokesman, Gregory Burke, announced that Cardinal Pell would be "on leave but he is actually considered outgoing." Cardinal Rambo, a frequent guest of Pope Francis at the Casa Santa Marta, was in charge again.

  
You get the picture? Do you smell something rotten in the state of the Vatican? 

Oh but, you say, those sex abuse charges - which the notoriously corrupt Victorian police had been planning since 2015, when Cardinal Pell first went head-to-head with Cardinal  Calcagno - can't have had anything to do with the Vatican.

No??? Of course, in the Church of Nice in New Zealand, such a thing is inconceivable. 

So what did the Vatican have to do, then, with the death in 1986 of financier Michele Sindona, whose bank had collapsed, leaving the Holy See short by US$30 million, and who died in prison after drinking coffee laced with cyanide? Or with the murder of Roberto Calvi, the collapse of whose Banco Ambrosiana (named for St Ambrose!) would cost the Holy See US$224 million "in recognition of moral involvement"? 

On June 5 1982 Calvi had written to Pope John Paul II warning that his bank's collapse "would provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage". On June 18, Calvi's body was found hanging from Blackfriars' Bridge London, his pockets stuffed with bricks.

And the plot thickens: Calvi was a member of the illegal masonic lodge Propaganda Due. Just before he died, Calvi stayed in the same flat as a small-time drug dealer who was found dead with masonic papers in his pocket, giving the names of the members of Propaganda Due. 

According to his indictment at the ensuing trial of the grand master of the P2 Lodge, Licio Gelli, for Calvi's murder, his motive was to prevent Calvi blackmailing masons in the P2 Lodge or anyone in the Vatican Bank, whose investments he'd managed - some with large amounts of cash from the Cosa Nostra. The Mafia allegedly were keen to stop Gelli revealing that his Banco Abrosiano was used for their money laundering - but Gelli did admit that the killing was commissioned in Poland, because of Calvi's alleged involvement in bankrolling the Solidarity movement, at the request of none other than Pope John Paul II.

In the end, by May 2009 after two trials, one in a specially fortified courtroom in Rome's Rebibbia prison, Gelli and another five accused got off. 

Lack of evidence. The prosecutor could have done with a page out of the playbook of the Victorian police.

Then there were Public Prosecutor Emilio Alessandrini and lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, whose investigations into scandals linked to the Vatican 'bank' -, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) - said to have been notorious for money-laundering for decades, came to a sticky end: in 1979 both men were bumped off, Ambrosoli by a Mafia hitman at the instigation of none other than Michele Sindona (yes, we've met him before) who drank that poisoned coffee when banged up for the death of Ambrosoli. 

And guess what? Roberto Calvi's son, Carlo Calvi, suspected that his father's death implicated Cardinal Paul Marcinkus (known, charmingly, as 'The Gorilla'), former head of the Vatican Bank. Italian authorities thought the same, perhaps because almost everyone closely associated with Marcinkus and his financial ploys had wound up dead. 

I suppose the most famous of Marcinkus' alleged victims was Pope John Paul I, who was assisted in his passage to eternity by none other than Marcinkus's first cousin, Columbian gangster Anthony Raimondi. It is Raimondi's own lips what have said it, the motive for his poisoning by cyanide (a Mafia go-to fix-it ?) being John Paul I's declared intention to expose Vatican bank operators for a billion-dollar stock fraud. 

The $1billion lost by IOR had been lent to off-shore companies owned by ... Cardinal Marcinkus. He was referring to the scandal of losing US$224 million when he famously commented, "You can't run the Church on Hail Marys." Nazi gold was the Gorilla's alternative: in 1998 the US State Department confirmed that at least $47 million of Nazi gold was laundered by the IOR under Marcinkus.

Of course it may have been entirely coincidental that an investigative journalist named Mino Pecorelli, who was busying himself with Marcinkus' financial affairs, was also murdered. And how did The Gorilla get away with it? He had sovereign immunity granted to Vatican City by Mussolini, invoked on behalf of Marcinkus by Pope John Paul II.

Pecorelli was a mason, a member of Propaganda Due, who had published a list of masons highly placed in the Catholic Church - which, not all NO Catholics would know, automatically excommunicates masons, the reason being that Freemasonry's raison d'etre is to destroy the Church. 

Pecorelli's list named Paul Marcinkus, codename Marpa, along with Cardinal Jean Villot, Secretary of State for Paul VI, Cardinal Leo Suenens, promoter of Protestant Pentecostalism, Cardinal Ulo Poletti, President of Pontifical Works and - ironically - Preservation of the Faith, Cardinal Augustin Bea, Secretary of State under Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, and Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, recently a staunch opponent of the 'Dubia' - and Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, architect of the Novus Ordo Mass. 

Are you still with me, people? All I intended was to suggest that a frame-up of Cardinal George Kangaroo Pell was, in the overall scheme of things concerning the Vatican and its sundry villains, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Then I got carried away with the enormity of it all and like a kid at the top of a steep slope who starts running, I couldn't stop till I reached the bottom.

Only, it's not the bottom. Or rather, it's as if what's stopped me at the bottom is a cesspool - of homosexuals living and working in the Vatican, a 'gay lobby' which operated (operates?) in a tight network of corrupt opportunists with criminal connections who trade in and profit from diplomatic privileges, customs immunity and money laundering through the IOR - and all vulnerable to blackmail.

I'm not even going to start on their putative part in a possible frame-up of the Kangaroo Cardinal who came to Rome with a reputation as being "particularly brutal to homosexuals". 

"Homosexual activity," he once remarked, "is a much greater health hazard than smoking".

Anyway. As a man who speaks the truth and lives it, Cardinal George Pell would seem better off in solitary confinement in Melbourne, communing with his Lord and God, than in the Vatican dancing with the devil.

And I'm not suggesting it's because they've read this article (as if!) but this very day, an international group of financial watchdogs announced it has denied the Vatican access to its secure web system where members share information about money laundering, tax fraud and other financial finagling.

In effect, the Egmont Group doesn't trust the Vatican's Financial Information Authority (AIF) with its information - and can we blame them?

Pope Francis has just replaced AIF's president and a member of AIF's board promptly resigned in protest on Monday. 

French German banker Marc Odendall put it this way: "There is no point in staying on the board of an ineffective organization." 

Ineffective??? That's a nice way of putting it.



Matthew Walton says:
          A letter in the current N.Z. Catholic was seeking assurance on Vatican finances; I pen this response via way of your blog.


 Dear Michael (Otto),

                       The news we hear about the Vatican finances is grim but it is credible and real.

           There is a book in the Palmerston North Public Library - a 20th Century history of Vatican finances. (Sorry, I can't remember it's name.) The point though is that the Popes of the early 20th C.  realised that the Vatican finances needed more rigour. Lay experts were appointed and, it seems, they attained too much leeway in the manner of operations,- leading up to the scandals of the 1980s. Vatican finances have, it seems, forever been looked at askance by the Italian government, various European governments, and now the E.E.U.

           When Italy became part of the E.U., there was an inevitable impulse for the Vatican to follow suit and adopt the Euro as its currency (it had been the Lira.)

           Vatican finances have been scandal-plagued since at least the end of WW2.  With so much cash coming in and going out , there is an immense capacity for money-laundering, tax-evasion and avoidance (by European citizens), and for hiding and disbursing large amounts of cash. (Cardinal Pell is reported to have found over 1 billion Euros in unaudited cash.) So when the Vatican currency changed to the Euro, European financial institutions began to require of the Vatican a higher professional standard of financial transparency.

          Nevertheless, as is evident, these standards have not yet been met , either in Christian moral terms, in terms of financial wisdom or even in terms of common sense. Hence, we get the current scandals around property purchase and investment: Peter's Pence disbursements, US$25 million of the Papal Fund used for a bankrupt Italian hospital, Italian financial police raiding a Vatican Secretariat of State office, for example. (The hospital was also being investigated by Italian financial police for money-laundering).

          These scandals are real. They have been reported by credible journalists. It will take a while for it all to straighten out. Now we have a new leader of the Secretariat for the Economy (replacing Cardinal Pell). Let's hope he knows what he is doing.

       One thing to remember, in charity institutions, when money goes awry, God looks at the intentions of those who give, and all things work to good for those who trust Him. We must continue to expect financial regularity. Those institutions rise or fall to the extent that they achieve this or otherwise.

               
Matt Walton.