Peter Kreeft says the Catholic Church Must Become More Protestant
When I was in grade school, there was a movement in the parish where my Catholic school was that happened alongside the push for “RENEW” — the “Gym” Mass. A young hippy priest, Fr. Tom, came in and decided that us kids didn’t like pews and pipe organs and traditional hymns, so they’d have Mass with guitars, hippy music, and “relevant” sermons instead. I went once. I think I was only interested in seeing what was happening. Even as a child, I hated the droning hymns of GIA and Gather. I hated the guitar even more, especially because it lacked the mystery and majesty of a pipe organ that made the very air alive. In my estimation, the gym Mass was merely a method of trying to “protestantinize” the services, and match the new bible study groups and self-guided disasters of RENEW & Co.
In hindsight, the only thing the bible studies and “small faith” groups did was pull people away from forty hours devotions, sodalities, and prayer cenacles, after which the people who went often met at a local diner for breakfast, coffee, or other social time. Instead, they were supposed to be social during the prayer or bible study. One thing the old guard understood, pray together at Church in front of Our Lord and be together, taking that grace out into the world, at the diner. They knew how to be social. These new hippies with their guitars and bibles underarm did not. It’s no surprise they failed to see social life in the old guard because they were misfits who insisted to persist in their misfit ways. (more...)
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