A well-deserved snow day, and much enjoyed, is just wrapping up. While I still got a lot done, completing another sonnet that I will perhaps post later, and also finishing Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth wherein I had long been bogged down, the general attitude on campus reminds me of the guy on the Milligan's Island ginger ale logo. Except it's a bit colder here.

What to do on a lazy snow day? Chronicle liturgical abuse, of course. It is the traditionalist's surest reflex. Although we are much indebted to the thorough work of Chris Gillibrand of Catholic Church Conservation, his content seems to be off for now, and he usually reports the goings-on in Germany and the rest of the Continent. But there has been liturgical abuse in our own back yard. Good intentions aside, whenever I walk into the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, I cannot help but get this feeling.

I have seen many sanctuaries in my time. As the name implies, they are sacred, and should look like this (at the minimum)


























not like this














It's hard to see, but the display is made from some of the debris from the Great Ice Storm of 2008. At first edging arithmetically upwards, at the end a here barely perceptable branch shoots up, sort of like in Al Gore's hockeystick CO2 graph in An Inconvenient Truth.


True, the sanctuary looks like a stage, and was just asking for this, but all of these types of displays are so... formless. As such, they do not direct our minds upward by their beauty. You may say, To each his own; to me this is beautiful. I say: the sanctuary is where the consecration happens, where bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of the King of kings, and where He should be permanently enthroned in the tabernacle (that Christ is cordoned off to the side is another offense to His dignity): anything in the sanctuary should have a clear purpose in or in inspiring worship, and should be at least worthy of a monarch's throne room. This seasonal display fits neither criterion.

And if you still don't think that's bad, every Lent they take away our Holy Water (even if it's become a common practice, they shouldn't) and instead give us
















if you can't see them from there,












sea glass. We are supposed to take a piece with us, and place it in a jar when we have done some sort of good work, et cetera. What ever happened to recalling our baptismal vows, and purifying ourselves as we enter the house of the Lord? However, I think I will save mine: that way, I can have it as a memento of the Age of Liturgical Abuse once it is long past. Better yet, some Catholic publisher should make a coffee table book chock full of images of the liturgical (and visual) abuse now so common, but which will largely disappear once the Traditional Latin Mass becomes standard issue again (as is inevitable considering the growth of traditionalist orders and the decline of everyone else). A CD of Dan Shutte tunes could accompany the tome, that future generations could also know the auditory abuse we must suffer through.