Just Who Was Being Served?

A sad tale of an aging boomer who just can't let go of the past. From a comment on Fr. Zuhlsdorf's blog:

One of my friends went to Mass recently where the parish is being renovated back to a more traditional expression of Catholicism...Well, they were making some more ornamental changes last week, restoring the use of votive candles, etc. One of the habitless nuns who ran the liturgy for years...came into the Church all aflutter seeing what was being added (the votive candle racks). She thought that the candle racks on either side of the sanctuary and the new golden candlesticks on the high altar detracted from the portable altar, standing in the center in all its Vatican II bareness.

“This is all too distracting, it takes away from the altar table,” she said. (She used the term “altar table” like the Protestants do, not just “altar.”) She walked about the sanctuary very agitated, snapping at parish volunteers and griping about the new traditional decor of the Church. She walked over to the portable altar and, practically hugging it, cried "And what are you going to do with this?"

“We’d like to wheel it out to the trash bin, but we don’t have Father’s okay yet” came a sarcastic reply. Several of the parish volunteers laughed at this nun, who is about 67 and with her 2 nun assistants devoted years and years to turning the parish into something just like the neighboring Methodist Church instead of Catholic.

The nun turned on her heel, stomped across the sanctuary showing no respect for the blessed sacrament, and slammed the door so hard it broke the stained glass in it.

Actually, I feel nothing but sadness for that nun. No doubt she made life miserable for the traditional Catholics in her parish for many years but at 67, the post-Vatican II reforms having defined her whole career, she now nears retirement and watches the disavowal of her life's work by the very people she imagined she was serving, especially the young--the most galling, I should think. We must pray for her, it serves no purpose to laugh her to scorn; that she will find peace as the traditional worship she so abhors slowly makes its way back into Holy Mother Church and she will accommodate herself to it. At the same time she should also ask herself, who was being served by the innovations of the past thirty-five years, God or the egos of His creatures? It seems to this writer every reform foisted upon the people (in the Episcopal Church as well as the Catholic Church) was about making the people the object of worship and reducing God to the adjunct, the celestial Ed McMahon, guffawing in agreement.

Every folk Mass, every felt banner, every Sister Corita silk-screen Scotch-taped to the walls in the youth center and, especially, every card table altar with the priest's body and visage turned the wrong way from Jerusalem, seems to proclaim the same erroneous message: aren't we all just fabulous and God you'd better agree. Mercifully, this nonsense seems to be coming to an end in the Catholic Church (sadly, the Episcopal Church has irreversibly devolved into a gnostic death cult and will be extinct within a generation or two). There will be many casualties resulting from the mending of the severe damage done to the Holy Catholic Church in the name of reform, the poor nun above being an unfortunate example, but we must not lose sight of the fact the people shrieking the loudest over the corrective measures now being taken are often the ones who necessitated them.

(Thanks to Bro. James).