"Jesus Christ," says Palmerston North Cathedral's new PP, Father Joe Grayland, "came to save us as a group, not as individuals."
Today, in a guest post, Matthew Walton of Palmerston North reports that Fr Grayland, in last Sunday's homily, was reflecting on the genealogy of Christ.
"As for those people who go off to pray by themselves...."
Fr Grayland implied that this is not what prayer is meant to be.
He said, "This is prayer, when we come together like this in (public) liturgical acts." This was the gist of Father's homily.
In my view our PP was attacking the idea of personal prayer, solitary prayer, contemplative prayer. What would he make of Christ going off to pray alone - for long hours and frequently ? We are to imitate our Master - to become living, praying models of our Lord.
Essentially, he was also attacking the 'individual'. "He didn't come to save us as individuals, He came to save us as a community."
Wrong ! Wrong ! Wrong! Driving this thought is the concept of 'Collective Consciousness'. I challenge this thought. A sublime respect for the dignity of the individual is the foundation of any sound human community. This most definitely applies to Catholic, Christian and Orthodox communities. When we love one another, we don't love the 'collective' , we love the person - friend or foe - who represents to us an image of Christ.
Without this respect for each
human person, we don't have a real community, we have a dictatorship.
Communities are made up of individual persons, each one converted. At Judgment
Day each person stands as an individual before the Judgment of God.
Two weeks ago, in another Sunday homily Fr Grayland described the Incarnation as "Mary heard the Word in her ear and she gave birth through her ear". Apparently this is a medieval description.
Good Marian theologians do not refer to Our Lady in such crass, disgraceful terms. No mystical thinking there - and no faith. The description used by Pope John Paul II, "Christ came forth from the womb as he came from the tomb, and he came from the tomb as he came from the womb". Here the mystery of Faith is preserved.
Pope Francis, meanwhile, speaking on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, analysed Mary down to Mother, Woman, Disciple, A Marian principle, a Mestizo* (a mix, in this case, of God and Man)..This was in defence of his view that we don't need more Marian titles.
He is opposed to the title of "Co-Redemptrix") He called it 'nonsense'.
"Co-Redemptrix" is actually embedded in Catholic teaching; it just has not been proclaimed as a Dogma as yet.
The reason we need titles, dogmas and clear definitions is that they free the mind, point a direction for the spirit. They open for the many a field of metaphysical insight which hitherto was known only to a few.
*Dictionary definition: (in Latin America) a man of mixed race, especially one having Spanish and indigenous descent.
On the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Pope, Matthew Walton and Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano are of like mind. Yesterday in Rome, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the US issued this statement:
“On the liturgical memorial of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” Pope Francis “gave vent once again to his evident Marian intolerance,” striking at the heart the Marian dogma and the Christological dogma connected to it.
But “the Immaculate Theotokos, ‘terrible as an army with banner unfurled’ [acies ordinate] will do battle to save the Church and will destroy the unfettered army of the Enemy that has declared war on her, and with him all the demonic pachamamas will return definitively to hell.”
“For more than six years now we have been poisoned by a false magisterium, a sort of extreme synthesis of all the conciliar misconceptions and post-conciliar errors that have been relentlessly propagated, without most of us noticing it,” he writes.
“Thus,” he continues, “in the course of these last decades, the Mystical Body has been slowly drained of its lifeblood through an unstoppable bleeding: the sacred deposit of faith has gradually been squandered, dogmas denatured, worship secularized and gradually desecrated, morality sabotaged, the priesthood vilified, the Eucharistic Sacrifice protestantized and transformed into a convivial Banquet...”
The distinctive mark of modernist heresy, stresses Msgr. Viganò, is the concealment and “tactic of affirming what one wants to destroy, using vague and imprecise terms, promoting error without ever formulating it clearly.” The result, he says, is what we now have before our eyes: “a Catholic Church that is no longer Catholic; a container emptied of its authentic content.”
Archbishop Viganò concludes: “The Church is shrouded in the darkness of modernism, but the victory belongs to Our Lord and His Bride. We want to continue to profess the perennial faith of the Church in the face of the roar of evil that besieges her.
We want to keep vigil with her and with Jesus, in this new Gethsemane of the end times; to pray and do penance in reparation for the many offences caused to them.”
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