Fr. John A. Perricone: What in the World Is a “Worship Space”?

Msgr. Charles Pope: You Now Have Five Seconds to Comply – Judgment in a Commercial
March 16, 2019
Fr. Dwight Longenecker: The Church Malignant
March 16, 2019

Editor’s note: Pictured above is the modern Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco. Construction began in 1967 and was completed in 1971. The 1891 landmark cathedral it replaced was destroyed by arson in 1962. (Photo credit:Wikicommons) 

By Fr. John A. Perricone, Crisis Magazine, March 14, 2019

Euphemisms are de rigeur for revolutionaries. Communist states call themselves “people’s republics.” When they instigate conflicts, they are called “wars of liberation.” Abortionists call their abattoirs “pregnancy centers” and their executions “terminations.” Most currently, surgeons call sexual mutilation “gender reassignment.” All of this a clever strategy to stave off natural human revulsion so that after a sufficient passage of time the moral sense is deadened. And it works. George Orwell dramatized it in 1984 when he minted the word “newspeak” to name the manipulative devices of the Ubiquitous State and that very brutalizing State itself the anodyne “big brother.” Orwell was only dramatizing a parlous trend in Western culture, namely, plying junk sentimentality masquerading as Progress. It served to clog human language, prompting Graham Greene to quip: “When I hear about the brotherhood of man, I think of Cain and Abel.”

A deeper intellectual rot goes beyond euphemism to neologisms. Such novel constructions are yanked from the ether of a dreamy Gnostic redesign. These odd-sounding constructions are the bricks of a kind of Magic Kingdom far removed from the world of ordinary men. They are Gnostic because they leap from the inventive imaginations of intellectuals frustrated by the humdrum landscape of reality. T.S. Eliot wrote well in Burnt Norton: “Human kind/cannot bear very much reality.” The twentieth century boasted of many intellectual tribes who excelled in the manufacture of neologisms, not least in the Catholic Church. Hers were called the New Theologians (the Nouvelle Théologie). Spawned in the ferment of early twentieth-century Modernism, they devotedly went about the business of refashioning the Catholic Church. Once they had finished their labors of “reimagining” the doctrinal pillars of Catholicism, they turned their attention to the principal engine used to propagate the Church’s dogmatic teaching:  the Sacred Liturgy…..Read entire article, go to: crisismagazine.com/2019/what-in-the-world-is-a-worship-space