Yesterday, because the weather was so nice, I put on my best pair of tennis shorts and a matching T-shirt and headed off to Sunday Mass at St. Chaotica's. After Mass, as I always do, I met friends and stood in the center aisle catching up on the gossip and news of the past week. Then, this rude person came up to us and asked us to take our conversation out to the vestibule or over to the parish hall where coffee and doughnuts were being served, because ― get this! ― people were trying to pray after Mass and we were disturbing them!

I've never been so insulted in my life!  I've been a member of this church for over twenty years and the nerve of some people to tell me to shut up in my own church! How discourteous to interrupt a conversation like that. 

Besides, Didn't the Vatican council say that it's more important to focus on community and relationship than on private prayer?

Annie Diotte

Have you never read Psalm 46, verse 10, "Be still and know that I am God!" or again, the book of Proverbs, Chapter 1, verse 7, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom?" Even the great commandment, "Love God and love your neighbor" at (Deut 6:4) which begins with "Hear O Israel." In other words, "sit down, shut up and listen."

How can one obey God and love one's neighbor if he fails to listen first?   I know a number of people who became Catholic because they were so impressed by the reverent awe that Catholics displayed in Church. I wonder if they are still Catholic.  

If it is true that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, no wonder we've raised up a couple of generations of fools since the so called "spirit of Vatican II" has engendered a more user friendly version of God and His Church. Don't get me wrong. The Second Vatican Council was inspired by the Holy Spirit. The problem is that those most enthused about the "Spirit of Vatican II" have never read the documents the council produced. It alarms people to find out that the Second Vatican Council insisted that Latin be retained in the Mass and that the council documents never said that the priest should face the people during Mass. Somehow people got the impression that the council had introduced a whole new era in which we would make things up as we went along.

What happened was that the consumer culture spawned in Europe and the United States after World War II hijacked the heady aftermath of the Vatican Council and remade Catholicism in its own image. After the war, a huge case of “Scarlet O'Hara Syndrome” set in. You know, Scarlet O'Hara of “Gone with the Wind” fame. At one point in the movie she is staving and digging for edible roots. She stands up, shakes her fist at heaven and says, “So help me God! I will never be hungry again.” She then proceeds to become rich and ruins the lives of everyone with whom she comes in contact.  

After the World War II, the American economy was roaring and the returning soldiers were spending and we came to believe that the purpose of life was to own a lot of stuff. We've raised two or three generations in that philosophy and the result is apparent: kids who live in a cocoon of cell phones, I-pods, computer-based “relationships”, designer gym shoes, and car stereos that rattle your teeth! “I want it and I WANT IT NOW!” That cultural disaster has leaked back into the church, not because of the council, but because of a desire to make God over in the image of American consumerism. “What’s in it for me?” “I am the reason for the world’s existence, not God and all that nonsense about self sacrificing love.”  

We treat the church as if it were just an extension of our basement recreation rooms and dress accordingly in ripped blue jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. People come dressed in sweat suits because it's more comfortable and they're going off to the gym anyway after Mass is done.  And we talk, talk, talk with 3/4 forgetting that God, the creator of the universe, has humbled himself to be contained in the form of bread and wine, and waits for us in every tabernacle in every Catholic church throughout the world. “But NO!! 3/4 I am the measure of all things and what really matters is that I am comfortable.” 

If we really believed that on Sunday morning we were going to encounter the creator of the universe, we would dress in our finest clothes, we would get there early in order to get a front row seat, and we would wait in hushed silence hoping to hear the sound of angels' wings.  Instead we come late, we dress like slobs and we think that we are there to chatter mindlessly with old friends until the show starts. I have nothing against greeting old friends. But for the sake of all that is holy, do it in the vestibule, or if your church has coffee after Mass, plan to stay fifteen minutes extra and go to the parish hall. K-Mart and the gym will still be open when you're done. Greeting our fellow believers is a wonderful thing, but there is a time and a place. (Ec. 3:7 “…a time to keep silence and a time to speak.”)

If you are not interested in hearing the Lord in the silence of your heart at least respect those who are trying pray. It was not that poor person who politely asked you to go into the vestibule; it was you who was the self-centered boor without reverence for holy ground. Ps 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.”

The new more user-friendly Catholicism we have invented in this country has little power to stir men's hearts. In seeking to entertain we have only managed to become boring and most of a generation has been lost to the majesty and saving power of God. We have produced a generation of people who have no concept of reverence, and thus are fools who don't even suspect that God really exists. 

Thank heaven that in some places the church seems to be waking up and shaking off the colossal hangover from the party that was the groovy sixties and seventies.  

Let God arise and His enemies be scattered! (Psalm 68:1)

Sincerely,

Rev. Know-It-All