(LifeSiteNews) —An American archbishop has echoed Catholic evangelist Ralph Martin in a call for the Church to stop censoring the Word of God within the liturgy.
In a recent blogpost, Archbishop Thomas Gullickson, the Sioux Falls, South Dakota-born Apostolic Nuncio to Ukraine, added his voice to Ralph Martin’s in criticising the suppression of challenging texts of Sacred Scripture in the contemporary Catholic liturgical cycle of readings and in the arrangement of the Psalms in the Liturgy of the Hours.
In a YouTube video, Ralph Martin brought up certain challenging verses in the letters of St. Paul that warn of the eternal consequences of sin—verses that may be skipped when the passage is read on its assigned Sunday. He commented that Christians who are not living a good life, who “have made a god out of something that isn’t God … need to be shocked into conversion. They need to be shocked into repentance. They need to be shocked into faith. They need to hear about the eternal consequences.”
“We need to be concerned about the salvation of souls,” Martin continued. “And if we’re eliminating from the Scripture the warnings and the consequences of not following Jesus, we’re robbing people of a truth that will save them.”
Archbishop Gullickson echoed Martin’s warnings about the danger of editing the Word of God.
“Watching a Ralph Martin video got me to thinking about my own experience of the post-conciliar regime of censorship which has deprived us Catholics of not [a] few passages of Sacred Scripture,” the archbishop wrote.
“Martin does an excellent job of shining a light into this dark place in the so-called liturgical reform,” he continued.
“Catholics deserve to know that, for the most part, whether it is the Breviary or the voluminous Lectionary for Mass, there are glaring omissions sadly intent on keeping us from that which makes the Word of God that which it should be: a two-edged sword for our sanctification.”
Thinking of those who choose to omit the hard passages of Scripture in the texts of the Novus Ordo liturgy, Gullickson warned, “Hard hearts may be closed to the Word even when proclaimed, but woe to those who withhold the Word! They are depriving the children of the Kingdom of proper nourishment!”