Liturgical Renewal Has Been Run By Sexual Liberationists
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For more than 30 years, the Catholic lay faithful in North America have been told the liturgical renewal demanded by Vatican II requires constant experimentation and adaptation of the Mass until such a point that the people in the pews, finally, become engaged in "full, conscious, and active participation."
No matter how many tricks are tried to make the Mass (and the people attending) "come alive," the goal is never reached and more surprises are soon on their way down the liturgy trail.
For more than 30 years, no one — certainly not most bishops, priests, and laity — except a select few prelates, priests, and liturgists in crucial Church positions ever imagined that the liturgical "renewal" was — and remains — driven in a significant measure by homosexual and pedophile clerics to change Catholics' understanding of the nature of the Church, and to express their vision of a new church: one that is "tolerant," "compassionate," and "loving"; not "rigid," "formalistic," and "legalistic."
Those who persist in doubting or denying this is the case will have a difficult time after reading investigative reporter Sylvia MacEachern's expose of the clique that has managed the liturgical revolution in Canada since the end of the Second Vatican Council.
Her 100-page research project, published in the current edition of The Orator, the newsletter of the St. Brigid's Association, names the homosexual clerics, the convicted pedophile priests, the radical feminists, Marxists, and other assorted fifth columnists who "renewed" the Catholic liturgy in Canada and engineered one of the greatest debacles in the history of Church: the nearly total destruction of the Church in Canada.
Most Catholics in the United States and Canada who still attend Mass are not aware of how their psyches are manipulated in the "process" of liturgical "renewal." They remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that the liturgical revolution will remain in full swing until, as Fr. Richard Fragomeni of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago remarked in Los Angeles last year, "it becomes as attractive as sex" (see The Wanderer, August 5, 1999).
Fragomeni isn't the only liturgist who believes "we haven't yet begun the renewal."
MacEachern shows that Fragomeni's line is the mantra of the liturgical renewal establishment in North America, and that the "renewal" underway, which has deformed the Roman Rite of the Mass in ways never imagined by a majority of the council fathers at Vatican II, is linked to advancing gender dysphoria, narcissistic psychotherapy, and the entertainment obsession which are all components of the sexual revolution.
With meticulous and depressing detail, MacEachern shows that, just as Cranmer's liturgical revolution at the time of the Reformation was engineered to liberate England from the political and economic controls of Rome, so the liturgical "renewal" imposed upon unsuspecting Catholics after Vatican II was designed and implemented to effectuate a permanent moral revolution against the papacy and the universality of the Catholic faith.
Among the many reminders she offers her readers to make her point is this: At precisely the same time that the Canadian bishops, at the prompting of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops' English Office of Liturgy — headed by bishop, later cardinal, G. Emmett Carter — decreed the vernacular, turned the altars around, instructed their people to receive Communion standing, in the hand — all of this years before Pope Paul VI decreed the Novus Ordo — the bishops sent a letter to Canadian Justice Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau supporting his proposals for the decriminalization of abortion, divorce, contraception, and homosexuality.
The year was 1966.
That same year appeared the Canadian Catechism, which said nothing about the Ten Commandments, the precepts of the Church, original sin, the divinity of Christ, the Real Presence, the Sacrifice of the Mass, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the sacraments, the infallibility of the Pope; but it did say a lot about the "spirit of Vatican II."
Not coincidentally, 1966 is also the year the Canadian bishops made the sex education of children in their Catholic schools a priority.
Origins Of An Investigation
Sylvia MacEachern's research into Canada's liturgical establishment began last spring when a lawsuit alleging sexual abuse was filed against prominent Canadian liturgist Fr. Barry Glendinning, a priest of the Diocese of London, Ontario, who had worked as a liturgist in seminaries across Canada.
"I started interviewing Glendinning's victims and their families," she told The Wanderer, "and others who knew him, and when I saw these allegations go back decades, I started reading his material. What struck me was his great aversion to the Real Presence, and I was reminded of an old article from the Dublin Review which observed that Queen Elizabeth refused to stay at Mass if the Host were elevated.
"The more I read about what happened in Cranmer's England and meditated on what we've been going through here for the past 35 years, I realized we were reliving the Reformation, but that ours was driven by a sexual agenda," she added.
The more she delved into Glendinning's professional past as a liturgist, and looked at his connections to other liturgists, bishops, and seminaries, she realized that he could serve as a profile and model for the modern liturgical deconstructionist.
Her investigation, titled The Painted Preying Liturgist, opens with several horrific descriptions of Glendinning's sexual abuse and torture of children in his apartment at St. Peter's Seminary in London, at a cottage he owned and in area parks in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while G. Emmett Carter was bishop of London.
Her accounts are based on her personal, face-to-face interviews with five of Glendinning's victims, the mothers of two of the victims, one victim's sister, numerous private investigators, police officers, and detectives, as well as court documents and newspaper reports.
At the same time Glendinning was teaching at the seminary, and serving as the vice chairman of the London Liturgical Commission, a number of other future bishops and archbishops, as well as prominent liturgists, were either students or professors at St. Peter's, including Marcel Gervais, the future archbishop of Ottawa; Eugene LaRocque, the bishop of Alexandria-Cornwall; and Bishop James Doyle of Peterborough.
In May 1974, Glendinning, then 40, pled guilty to six counts of gross indecency involving six children, ages 11-16, was placed on probation for three years, and sent to Southdown, a rehabilitation center outside of Toronto. Sadly, however, his career as a pedophile and liturgist did not end then.
Rather, his career took off, under the tutelage of the future cardinal archbishop of Toronto, G. Emmett Carter, who would eventually serve as a president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, president (1971-1973) of ICEL, the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, a member of the Concilium under Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, and a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship.
Glendinning, after Ordination in 1964, was sent to Sant'Anselmo in Rome to pursue advanced studies in liturgy, and upon his return was appointed professor of liturgy at St. Peter's in London. He helped Bishop Carter prepare the Canadian conference's first post-Vatican II hymnal (which established the precedent for the "I worship me" genre of church music), and after working in London, took assignments as a liturgy professor in Edmonton at both the Newman Theological College and St. Joseph's Seminary. He also served on the Archdiocese of Edmonton's Liturgical Commission.
While in Edmonton, Glendinning continued sexually abusing young men — altar boys — though no charges were filed against him.
In 1983, with Carter now in Toronto, Glendinning was invited to work in parishes in the Toronto suburbs. Ironically, the pastors he was assigned under were accused of "misconduct."
Carter appointed Glendinning to chair the Liturgical Commission of the Archdiocese of Toronto. Subsequently, in 1987, Glendinning was invited to teach liturgy courses at St. Paul's Seminary in the Archdiocese of Ottawa, which works closely with the National Liturgical Office of the CCCB and awards a "Certificate in Pastoral Liturgy," a degree coveted by would-be liturgists in both the United States and Canada.
At the time the London newspapers reported the lawsuits against Glendinning last summer, he was still teaching at St. Paul's and speaking on the North American liturgical circuit.
Glendinning's invitation to teach seminarians and liturgists in Ottawa came from the "guru" of the Canadian liturgical scene, Fr. William Marravee, professor of sacramental theology at St. Paul's, and a member of the Societas Liturgica, the Catholic Theological Society of America, the Canadian Theological Society, and the North American Academy of Ecumenists.
As MacEachern documents thoroughly by footnoting sources and quotes, Marravee does not believe in God; nor does he believe in the Real Presence or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He thinks the idea of an ordained priesthood obstructs the development of the community and speaks and writes in favor of lay homilists and female presiders.
Joining Glendinning in teaching at Canada's most prestigious Summer Institute for liturgists are these major personalities (just a few of the many MacEachern identifies) pushing liturgical "renewal" across North America:
• J. Frank Henderson, adjunct professor at St. Stephen's College (Edmonton), a longtime member of ICEL, who believes: "Liturgies that are just and in which true freedom is experienced are inclusive; they include and unite persons in the local community, persons all around the world, and ourselves and all creation. . . ." Henderson worked on ICEL's "inclusive language" project from 1977-1987 and, as Helen Hull Hitchcock pointed out in her work The Politics of Prayer (Ignatius), revealed that ICEL's advisory committee considered producing a feminist liturgy a priority.
• Dr. Mary Schaefer of Nova Scotia, a Notre Dame Liturgical Studies graduate who now teaches at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax. As MacEachern writes: "Schaefer contributes a particularly feminist perspective with her notion that probably in the early Church 'householders served as liturgical presidents' but in later years 'Catholic tradition has excluded persons otherwise apt on the basis of race, marital status, or gender'." She hopes that someday bishops will "authorize laity, including 'lay' religious, to preside at the parish eucharist."
• Caryl Green, a CCCB staffer with the National Office of Religious Education, who believes that a major obstacle to ecumenism is "the inhumanity of theological positions."
• Fr. Eugene King, another Notre Dame Ph.D. with a licentiate in biblical studies from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, who is rector of St. Paul's Seminary and director of the university's Institute for Pastoral Studies. He regrets that most people attending Mass today do not appreciate "the liturgy of the word [is] the spiritual meal of the week," and says Mass should be understood as "partying."
MacEachern's list of St. Paul's liturgy staff (and their credentials) makes a number of powerful points, perhaps the most essential of which is the importance of the Notre Dame University Center for Pastoral Liturgy in maintaining the liturgical revolution. Almost all of Canada's most influential liturgists acquired their degrees there, and even the most casual glance at their subsequent writings and speeches reveals their disconnectedness to the Catholic Tradition and their commitment to the deconstruction of the Latin liturgy.
In this milieu of Marxists, radical feminists, pro-homosexualists, and New Agers at St. Paul's, Glendinning would, no doubt, feel comfortable.
In his writings, published by Novalis and the Liturgical Press, Glendinning reveals himself as a font of the anti-Church agitprop that Catholics today encounter everywhere, especially when their churches are to be "renovated."
In Preparing the Eucharist, he proclaims that "the people are the new sanctuary of God," that the "assembly is the church," that the Church "tended to obscure the true identity of the liturgy," that the Church put "too singular an emphasis on the real and substantial presence of Christ in the eucharistic food and drink [and] has obscured the real presence of Christ in every dimension of the celebration."
In Preparing to Preach, Glendinning tells liturgists the assembly is a "community of prophets" which already "is at home with its God," so "moralizing admonitions" are not appropriate because "the church is by definition the community that has already embraced the kingdom of heaven."
In Preparing to Preside, Glendinning puts forth the case for lay presiders of the Mass, suggesting that the alb is "the vesture of the people of God." He says altars should resemble tables and the consumption of bread and wine should resemble the meal one has at home.
In Preparing the Eucharist, Glendinning suggests that a church's interior space be arranged so the entire assembly can gather around the table; that teams of parishioners bake the bread and make the wine; that the assembly "closely scrutinize the tableware the community uses for the meal"; that "if extra plates or cups are needed for a celebration, they, too, should be fitting for the feast"; that the bread should be "tasty" and there should be "generous" cups for the wine; that the meal should be presided by a gathering where people can "mix" socially; that the assembly should stand throughout the eucharistic prayer and the period of communion, etc.
Glendinning is also an advocate of children's — if not childish — liturgies.
In Children and Liturgy, he wrote: "Children invite us to do liturgy rather than read it. They invite us to experience liturgy more as an art form than an intellectual exercise. Children invite us to play at liturgy rather than to suffer through it. If we allow their way of participation to touch us, we might just 'have fun' at liturgy sometimes."
It Gets Worse
MacEachern's 100-page backgrounder on Canada's liturgical revolution contains — in addition to the accounts of Glendinning's sexual abuse of children and the names, backgrounds, and bibliographies of the major players in Canada's ongoing liturgical revolution — a chronicle of the attacks on the Mass and the Church's doctrine pertaining to the Real Presence during the English Reformation.
It also shows how the "renewal" of the liturgy, as it has evolved in both Canada and the United States, is part of a larger agenda to remake the Church according to the "visions" of Marxist ideologues and the imaginings of Teilhard de Chardin, an agenda which involves a seamless garment of education: of children in Catholic schools and religious and sex education programs, so-called social justice programs, parish adult education programs, and seminary, college, and theologate programs.
In this regard, it is important to point out, as MacEachern does, that Glendinning's Introduction to Liturgy class at St. Paul's is mandatory for all students pursuing any license or degree in the field of religious education.
This special edition of The Orator is available for $12.50, plus $4.50 (U.S.) shipping from the St. Brigid's Association, P.O. Box 71022, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2L9, Canada.
© The Wanderer, 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107, 612-224-5733, www.thewandererpress.com.
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