(LifeSiteNews) — In Madrid, a church has set up TV screens for visitors to come watch Spain’s World Cup before the tabernacle, which is shrouded with a red curtain. In Innsbruck Cathedral in Austria, people gather to eat pasta and socialize at a long table in front of another tabernacle, this one left exposed.
Meanwhile, a group of pilgrims traveling with a Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) priest were denied permission to offer the Latin Mass three times in three different cities in Italy. At San Giovanni Rotondo, they were forced to assist at Mass in a hotel basement. At Assisi, they learned that an Orthodox Divine Liturgy was taking place even as they were refused the ability to offer the TLM.
Catholic commentator Chris Jackson recently highlighted how these recent scenes are emblematic of what the postconciliar Church has become, revealing a larger pattern of exploiting instead of honoring the sacred. The full import of these events, however, is best understood through the eyes of Christ.
The first question we must ask is, what does all this mean for God? This is exactly the question that is being ignored in these abuses. The profane use of a consecrated Church, such as by using it as a banquet hall, is a grave sin: a sacrilege.
In fact, Catholic moral theology takes aim at the above-mentioned uses of churches as clear examples of sacrilege. Canon 1210 says only those things that serve worship, piety, or religion are permitted in a sacred place, and “anything not consonant with the holiness of the place is forbidden.” New Advent cites specific examples: “turning the church into a stable or a market,” or “using it as a banquet hall,” exactly what was done in Austria.
Such sacrileges betray either a lack of belief in the Real Presence of Christ there, a total lack of comprehension of His holiness, or a refusal to treat God as God, to honor His Presence with reverence and love. They further refuse to recognize His ownership over His Church.
The scene that helps us to understand how deeply offensive sacrilege of a church is to God is the cleansing of the Temple, when Christ overturned the tables of money changers and drove them out with a whip in His righteous anger. Their sin, first and foremost, was that they violated the sacredness of God’s temple. As in the case of other profane uses of a church, the sin is basically the rough equivalent of turning one’s back on God.
How much more offensive is the sacrilege of a Catholic church, where Christ is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament! I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Christ would be smashing televisions in the Church of San Antón in Madrid.
As these sacrileges take place — in many more Catholic churches than the two mentioned above — Catholics are denied the right to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in its traditional form on a local level, with the sanction of the highest (apparent) authority in the Church. This is the flipside of the sacrilege. As priests turn their backs on God by relegating their churches for profane use, they forbid the Mass that honors God with profound reverence and loving care, far more than the Novus Ordo.
At least just as much as sacrilege, such attempts to banish, snuff out, and exclude the traditional Latin Mass call upon the wrath of God. This was explicitly and authoritatively declared in St. Pius V’s bull Quo Primum, which declared that the Tridentine Mass is to be “freely and lawfully” used without “fear of incurring any penalty, judgement, or censure,” and that no priest is “obliged” to celebrate any other Mass. It stated that anyone who presumes to alter Quo Primum, of which forbidding the Latin Mass is the equivalent, “will incur the wrath of Almighty God.”
Taken altogether, the profane uses of churches and bans on the Latin Mass show an aversion to the sacred, to honoring God with serious reverence. How could clergy act so contrary to the mission of the Church and God Himself?
Clergy act with such aversion either because they have sinister intentions and are wolves in sheep’s clothing; or because having drifted from God, their consciences are burdened, and they are therefore uncomfortable with deep expressions of reverence, because such gestures reflect God’s greatness like a shadow. They cannot bear this because it stings their conscience.
By contrast, the Novus Ordo Mass obscures the holiness of God and allows people to treat God as a vague figment of their imagination to their own liking.
Besides offending God, forbidding the Latin Mass in any circumstance does a huge disservice to Catholics. It deprives them of a sense of who God is by failing to do justice to His greatness and His perfect purity. This even takes away from the meaning of His love and mercy. If we don’t have a sense of God’s great holiness and our own lowliness, how can we truly appreciate His mercy? And, therefore, the greatness of His love?
As Jackson suggests, indeed, a casual approach to God and discomfort with proper manifestations of the sacred are characteristic of the post-Vatican II, conciliar Church. The banishment of the traditional Mass to the “catacombs” is the logical conclusion of this attitude.
Who and what drives an aversion to the sacred? I don’t need to spell it out for you.
