Moving Forward from the Clown Mass

Christopher Johnson, the long-suffering but intrepid chronicler of egregious liturgical and theological horrors committed in the name of Anglicanism, every now and then (in the spirit of ecumenism, no doubt) turns his attention to the Holy Catholic Church where, of course, he can always find a wealth of material with which to work. He's dug up a doozy this time, concerning a Catholic loon in upstate New York who, through some colossal misunderstanding, managed to get himself ordained and placed in charge of the Newman Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Johnson received the following item from a blog called the Corning Curmudgeon, the proprietor of which, I hope, will not object to my wholesale copying and pasting it below. Take it away, sir!

Monday, February 23, 2009

Welcome to The "Mickey Mouse" Mass

My son Anthony attends Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Normally, he avoids the on-campus Neumann (sic) Center Mass and goes to St Stanislaus' down town for the Latin Mass. Well the weather was bad, and so he and his fiancee went to the Newman Center mass. Well, it was an "interesting" mass. Not in good way either. He sent me pictures.

Apparently the priest decided to "sprinkle" water on the congregation at the begining of Mass. Well the ritual deviated from the usual sprinkling rite. First there was the ritual blessing of the super-soaker (!)

Then we had the filling of the super soaker with holy water and then the "sprinkling" of the congregation with the super soaker.

Truely if that wasn't strange enough, apparently Father's liturgical color of the day was "tie-dyed." While colorful, it less than impressed the congregation of 20 or so college students who either were laughing through out or muttering under their breath. Of course all this was proceeded by even more loony-tunes stuff:

As Anthony puts it:

It was actually worse than the pictures make it out to be. He processed into mass behind the cross wearing the Mickey Mouse hat and a gold masquerade mask. Once the singing stopped, the first thing he did was blow a kazoo and say, "Happy Mardi Gras."

Things like this are not helping attract the youth to mass, nor to the Church. Bishop Clark....are you listening?

Ouch (but wonderful understatement in that last sentence). The only possible consolation for Catholics is whereas in the Anglican Church if there were any consequences at all for a priest who committed such a heinous act, they would likely include his being made bishop, in Holy Mother Church there is a chance, just a chance, mind you, someone with authority will crane his neck Rochester way and take some disciplinary action.