OH FR GRAYLAND GO START YOUR OWN POP-UP CHURCH

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Why doesn't Father Joe Grayland, parish priest at Palmerston North's cathedral, just slope off right now and start up another church of his own invention and more to his liking? 

Because once again, Fr Grayland is indoctrinating Catholics with pernicious meanderings that are anything but Catholic. And he can get away with it because Palmerston North still has no bishop. 

But really, he needn't go to the lengths of starting a new church. My Protestant friends on Facebook who got so worked up about the mystical experience of  the priest in Bogota would fall over themselves to welcome Fr Grayland into their denominations.

Because those Protestants don't believe in the Real Presence either. They'd get on with Fr Grayland like a house on fire. 

Father Grayland (who has a bunch of theological qualifications), invited a crony of his, a certain 'Tom Elich', evidently similarly endowed - who in the attachment Fr Grayland sent out yesterday went by the honorifics 'Rev Dr' rather than 'Father' - to contribute an essay on 'The Real Presence' for the edification of Palmerston North parishioners.

'Tom Elich' - who like Cardinal Call Me John Dew is evidently too 'umble to admit to being a priest

'Rev Dr Tom' Elich hails from Brisbane Australia. Maybe he's a slow learner; he asks rhetorically, "How do we understand real presence (sic)? What does it mean when Jesus holds bread (sic) and says, "This is my body(sic)?"

Rev Dr Tom Elich, who rejoices in a doctorate earned in Paris in mediaeval theology, seems not to know the doctrine of the Church he professes. He takes us someplace called Corbie in the ninth century and contrasts the differing beliefs on the Eucharist of two monks who lived there. One had "a literalist understanding ... of the eucharistic body of Christ (being) "virtually (qué?) the same as the historical body, born of the Virgin Mary. ... He supported his position with crude stories of bleeding hosts" (emphasis mine).

Monk No 2 had "a different understanding". (Truly, "there's nothing new under the sun" (Ecc 1:9).) He preferred to believe the Eucharist, while retaining "the form, smell and taste of bread and wine ... internally (had) ... "a divine reality perceived by the mind of faith".

The sacrament for No 2 monk cites Augustine (qué? but that's what Dr Tom writes) and "points (my emphasis) both to the body of the risen Christ and also to ... the Church".  In other words for monk No 2, the Blessed Sacrament is not literally Christ's Body but merely indicates It. That's what Dr Tom calls the 'sacramentalist view'. 

He then whisks his reader off to the eleventh century when Berengarius of Tours was "made to confess" that "the bread and wine ... are the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus  Christ" ... clearly he was teaching a sacramentalist position". Dr Tom would seem to mean that Berengarius had taught a sacramentalist position. The pluperfect tense would seem to be the one Fr Elich is after. 

"Clearly he was (had been, more like) teaching a sacramentalist position but was forced to adopt this ultra-literalist one." Well, yes, because this ultra-literalist one is the position of the Church. Then Dr Tom announces that "the sacramentalist view wins the day in terms of official theology". Presumably he means the theology which is or was (Dr Tom is no spring chicken) taught in Paris when he got his doctorate. He continues, "the literalist view has been remarkably persistent in the popular imagination until the present day".

Remarkably persistent, to the point that it is Church teaching, expressed not by 'the popular imagination' but by the catechism of the Catholic Church and any other reputable organ of the Church that one might care to name. Dr Tom goes on to assure us that it's not only 'popular imagination' that's at fault here, but 'popular belief'.He claims that the doctrine of transubstantiation is "a firmly sacramental presentation of the Eucharist"; that is  - going by his own specious definition - "the Eucharist is spiritual food, not carnal sustenance". 

"The problem for us is that we no longer understand reality in this way." Dr Tom may be employing the royal "we" - or the papal "we", or perhaps he's just saying that Fr Grayland and he no longer understand reality in this way. Fair enough.

Dr Tom's explanation of the Eucharist is "not really the explanation ... that some people imagine it to be". You're not kidding. 

"The accidents of the body and blood of Christ have no connection whatever to the Eucharist. This makes the eucharistic miracles of bleeding hosts or the appearance of Christ highly problematic ... the work of the mystical imagination." Ah, we get it now. Eucharistic miracles are a figment of overwrought imaginations.

The 700 year-old Eucharist miracle of Santarém, Portugal 

"Nor in fact can we imagine that Christ is in the host, or in the ciborium, or in the tabernacle." Speak for yourself, please, Dr Tom. There's that royal, or papal, or Fr- Joe-and-Dr-Tom plural again. 

"The liturgy encourages us to make the signs well - to have real bread that we can break into many parts, to receive communion from the cup. ... Acceptance of the sacramental nature of Christ's real presence liberates us from scruples. Dust from the consecrated bread which adheres to the ciborium, a stain on the purifier from the consecrated wine are not really bread and wine".

The Church you claim to belong to, Dr Tom, knows they're not bread and wine.They are the Body and Blood of Christ. 

Here, the satanic nature of the musings of Dr Tom (and by implication, of Fr Joe) become obvious.  His obfuscation about metaphysics serves to camouflage its effect, which is to promote further Eucharistic abuse and sacrilege. 

He has the infernal (I use the word advisedly) cheek to suggest we "embrace questions of fruitfulness". 

Yes, let's do that, shall we? Let's talk about the fruitfulness of the Novus Ordo liturgy, the gathering-round-the-table awfulness that Dr Tom is known for in Australia. Maybe he's outworn his discipleship there and is casting his eye over the Tasman. Maybe he and Fr Joe can slope off together and start their own new pop-up church. 

There's a funeral parlour in Napier where the SSPX are forced to celebrate their faithful, traditional Latin Mass; if Palmerston North were by the grace of God to be appointed a holy bishop (please, St Polycarp, intercede for us!) the SSPX should be given one of the three Napier city churches and Dr Tom and Fr Joe could pop up at Dunstall's Funeral Services.

Dr Tom's 'fruitfulness' reminds me of the '150 years of fruitfulness' that St Patrick's Waipawa celebrated last weekend: 150 years, drastically dropping Mass counts and just one ordination to the priesthood in living memory. 

Dr Tom also condescends "to compensate for the limitations of Thomas Aquinas' (for Dr Tom with his Parisian doctorate, the Angelic Doctor is not a saint) treatment of transubstantiation." 

For Dr Tom, "the whole Eucharistic Prayer ... offers God praise and thanksgiving." Oh yes, everything in Dr Tom's garden is rosy. No atonement for sin, as required by the Church, in Dr Tom's Eucharistic Prayer.

"... And allows us to enter into the memorial of Jesus' death and resurrection." No unbloody re-presentation of Calvary in Dr Tom's Eucharistic Prayer. No, it's just a 'memorial'. It would be kind of Dr Tom and Fr Joe to allow my Protestant Facebook friends to join them at Dunstall's. 

Dr Tom might be just daft. Or completely lacking in faith. Or full of pride, as in, "He can come in and say let's celebrate Mass Ad Orientum (sic) - and they can say what they like - but it has no more validity than anybody's personal opinion". 

Cardinal Sarah whose remarks on liturgical abuses the priest pictured above found "plain insulting"

Dr Tom was talking about Cardinal Robert Sarah, the then-prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. He added that Cardinal Sarah’s comments on liturgical abuses that neglected God as the central focus of the Mass were “just plain insulting to millions of Catholics around the world”.

“By everybody facing in the same direction facing the east is somehow more sacred, or recognising God’s presence more than any other (sic), that’s just insulting."

Dr Tom's essay (or whatever he likes to call it) concludes with the image of a rose that like the Blessed Sacrament is also "a symbol, a sacrament one might say."

Dr Tom, Fr Joe, you might say that. A faithful Catholic would not. Indeed, a faithful Catholic could not.