To Bury The Dead...
In which I use the word 'shocking' quite a lot.
Apparently, Archbishop Patrick Kelly formally commissioned 22 lay ministers to celebrate funeral ceremonies in an effort to relieve pressure on priests who sometimes must celebrate seven or more funeral Masses a week.
The move was announced through a shockingly Protestant brochure entitled, “Planning a Catholic Funeral”, published recently by the archdiocese. The brochure described a funeral as the “community’s main celebration and prayer for the deceased”.
“This could be a funeral Mass but … it may be a funeral service led by a lay funeral minister or a deacon,” it said. Shocking! Clearly a triumph for the phantom menace known as "the Spirit of Vatican II", the attempt to Protestantise all Catholic liturgy in the model served by Annibale Bugnini:
“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Prostestants.” — Annibale Bugnini, main author of the New Mass, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965. [NB, 45 years later, the Protestants are becoming more Catholic, and helping us remember the beauty of our heritage].
This is not Catholic; our faith teaches that it is the Eucharistic Sacrifice which is at the heart of the Paschal reality of Christian death, as it is in the Eucharist that the Church expresses her efficacious communion with the departed: offering to the Father in the Holy Spirit the sacrifice of the death and resurrection of Christ, she asks to purify His child of his sins and their consequences, and to admit him to the Paschal fullness of the table of the Kingdom. It is by the Eucharist thus celebrated that the community of the faithful, especially the family of the deceased, learn to live in communion with the one who "has fallen asleep in the Lord," by communicating in the Body of Christ of which he is a living member and then, by praying for him and with him. (CCC 1689)
Surely this is the essential metaphysical dimension, not some anthropological platitude that would fit in well with the ideology of Calvin or Luther? I am extrapolating from the fact that vocations in Liverpool declined sharply in recent years, and that the archdiocese projected that the number of priests will decline from 170 to 100 by 2015, along with the lack of basic catechesis for the last forty years, means that the Archbishop of Liverpool thinks that no one will notice. I should well imagine that the majority of people asking for a funeral these days probably have not set foot in a church for a number of years.
However, this matters not if we hold fast to the objective, metaphysical and otological reality of our faith. If we take these factors into account, surely the Archbishop is committing a terrible ecclesiastical crime?
More shock radiating from this reported at:
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