✣ Highlights from the week online
Liturgy shaming At Aleteia, William Bornhoft criticised the practice of “liturgy shaming’’: online groups who “curate the names of renegade parishes and liturgical horror stories. The posts are often accompanied with photographic evidence, usually something shocking or cringeworthy.” Bornhoft said: “We should ask ourselves whether it’s love of the Church that is guiding our hearts, or a sense of entitled judgment”. He asked if there wasn’t a better way to deal with liturgical abuses. “Depending on the circumstances, someone lower, such as a parish administrator, or higher, such as someone at the diocesan level, may be in a better position to handle your complaint.” On his blog Dr Joseph Shaw said Bornhoft’s hope was over-optimistic. “As chairman of the Latin Mass Society I know a thing or two about appealing to the proper authorities, and I have heard the stories of people who have been in this game since the 1970s.” It rarely works; worse, if the complaints are made public, “the whistleblower can find himself persona non grata in the parish and diocese”. Social media allows “a degree of anonymity” and, what’s more, it works: that’s why, for instance, the Australian priest who gave Communion to a dog was excommunicated. Online whistleblowing “should be done with care, with charity, dispassionately, with reference to authoritative documents, but it would be completely wrong to say that it should not be done at all.” Married priests, but... Sandro Magister noted an alternative perspective in the debate over married priests. The Mexican missionary Fr Vittorio Moretto, in his book on the subject, “does not rule out the possibility that the Latin Church might soon equip itself with married priests”. But Moretto says the tradition of the Church involves a condition: “They must remain under the discipline of continence, meaning abstention from sexual acts, as in the first centuries of Church history, starting in apostolic times.” Where was God? On his blog Neal Obstat, Tom Neal remembered a woman he had met in Washington DC, at a Missionaries of Charity house for homeless people in the latter stages of HIV/Aids. The woman, who was preparing for baptism, asked one of the Sisters why God had never intervened in the tragedies of her life. “Sister said to this woman: ‘Why don’t you ask Him yourself?’” She walked the woman over to the chapel, spoke briefly about the Blessed Sacrament, and “left her there alone. The woman remained in the chapel for at least two hours, crying loudly for stretches of time. Afterwards, she went to the Sister and very simply indicated she was ready for baptism. No more questions.”
