Irksome, Father?  Where were you some forty years ago when the rug was being pulled out from under us?  I was in my last year of high school.  Some of it is sort of a blur (happening as fast as it did.)  Some of it, however, is burned into my memory. 

The local priests who taught senior Religion scrapped the final text in our four-year religion course (an excellent series called, “Our Quest for Happiness”.)  To replace it, they collaborated on a thick volume full of psycho-babble and situational ethics.  I only remember one paragraph from the whole book.  This paragraph was written in praise of a “wonderful” organization that was helping people to “plan” their families.  (Hint:  It wasn’t the Couple to Couple League!)

My mother and father, both converts were well-grounded in the Church’s teachings on that subject.  They helped me navigate this and other minefields.  What about those whose parents didn’t know?  I think it is very telling that I, with only seven children, am considered by my peers to be the mother of a “large” family.  What does that make my mother with 13, or my sister with 12?

Irksome, Father?  We were torn from a beautiful, scripture and prayer-filled liturgy into a world of hootenanny and clown “masses”; Our Corpus Christi processions and Marian devotions were replaced by “liturgical dance”.  Our Eucharistic Lord was shoved off the central altar, many times into a converted broom closet.  Our main altars and Communion rails were chopped up to build Jacuzzis in the center aisle of our churches, so our priests could frolic during baptisms.

Irksome, Father?  We were ordered up off our knees into cafeteria lines to receive Holy Communion.  Many of us are still persecuted for genuflecting, and for refusing to touch the Body of Christ with unpurified hands.  

You might say I’m just getting warmed up, but I don’t want this to be a diatribe so much as a catalyst for thought and conversation about the havoc wreaked in the name of some nebulous “Spirit” of Vatican II, by priests who now find it “irksome” to change a word here and there back to its original meaning.

We’ve had our forty years in the desert.  We must just hope that’s all it is, and not another Babylonian captivity!

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