Ite, Missa Est
April 28, 2024
FROM “The Continuing Chaos,” (July, 1982) by W.F. Strojie:
Our priests have been made into religious, political and social change agents. Some of them don’t like it but nevertheless go along.
Frivolity, smiles all around, that’s the “in” style now, but these same men can be earnest enough at times. Here, in America since Vatican II, they have built hundreds of grotesque or synagogue-style new churches at fabulous expense. Fundamentalist sectarians of centuries ago could not match the iconoclastic fury of the new priests as they go about ripping out the old altars, throwing on dump heaps statues, Stations of the Cross, etc.
Recently a friend, in California, took me to see a local parish church — the plainest of square buildings, made of concrete blocks. A big square altar, slightly upraised, stands in the center of the building. Looking at this altar I visualized a fire underneath and the Temple animal sacrifice taking place. There was nothing else there — except metal folding chairs which could be picked up and taken out should the fire get away. In any event, metal chairs do not burn. A prudent pastor! And I have just heard that in a nearby Benedictine monastery 100 years old, they recently smashed the fine old marble main altar and threw it over a hill. The Vatican II and Protestant Table had stood before the main altar for years. Ite, Missa est. The Message could not be plainer.
Some of the old stuff was bad art work, products of a sickly school of piety and commercialism, but that’s not why it’s rejected by the updated priests. For behind the mod smile and frivolity and hedonism lurks a Manichean bitter hatred of the good, true and beautiful.
… The sun still shines. God remains in charge of the world. The recent lunar eclipse was not, as little children and many adults too, might have thought, a show put on by Science and Television. A Scriptural passage speaks of the heavens growing “dark with clouds”. With its mumbo jumb of “billions of years”, etc. the “Modern Science” idol leads into a true age of darkness. Cloudy intellects. This is the Devil’s own work, to obscure the image of God in nature, and in man himself. It has been the mission of the Vatican II ‘popes’ and other bishops to spread the Religion of Man. But not really. The Devil hates all men and himself — all that God has made. But he resorts to this kind of hypocrisy — by which hates pretends love, war is given out as peace-making — in order to further his own ends.
