The Fringe: June 2005 Archives

It's summertime, the season for outdoor Masses in garden shrines, the time for big events like WYD, and it's also the silly season where the fringe types like to put on their events too.

This week, the BBC ran a feature on a so-called ordination conducted by some of those German riverboat priestess dames, now pretending to be bishops.

As for the motivation of the would-be deaconette, here's a quote from the show's audio: "I'm a strong person, and some women, they are in the ceremony, in the background, and I like to be in front of them, and I feel, when I was younger, that the place where the altar is, that's my place."

Abp. John Foley, answering the reporter's questions to provide a Catholic point of view, has it pegged: "There's a universal call to holiness in the Church... I hope that all of us would strive for holiness and not for power."

(via the CWN blog)

Rev. Walter Cuenin of Our Lady, Help of Christians, a large parish in comfortable Newton, Massachusetts, defends himself in this week's bulletin (page 2): we're not undermining church teaching, we're just welcoming gays who happen to be civilly married, engaged couples who happen to be cohabiting, and divorcees who happen to be remarried without annulments. These practices "may not be the ideal", but these people are in "messy" situations, and we "welcome them and work with them on their journey".

This all seems kind of reasonable on the surface until you read on page 3 that two of the parish's organizations are inviting everyone to attend the Boston "Gay Pride" parade and hear a speech at an interfaith service by an advocate of "same-sex marriage". This goes beyond welcoming individuals with their problems: this is endorsement, this is advocacy.

Will the parish also encourage celebrations of pride in other cases of emotional disorder or objective wrongdoing? Maybe Invalid Marriage Pride Week will include a parade in which liberated upper-middle-class men stroll down the avenue, each with a trophy wife on his arm. Gluttons will ride with pride on floats made of food and eat them all the way down Boylston Street; tax-cheats (now out of the closet) will make a gross public display of paying their employees under the table, and the bacchanals will all be announced in the parish bulletin so that the faithful can participate.