The Center of the World - The Mass

“Worthy are you, Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power” for you created all things; because of your will they came to be and were created.” Rev 4:11

Before I post everything I want to say here, I want to clarify a few things.  I was born post Vatican II.  I do not know what it was like back then so everything I am about to state is filtered from a perspective of not having lived through what others have lived through.  Second, my purpose in posting this is NOT to judge people, either those in authority, or the rest of us, God explicitly tells me not to judge because that is for Him to do.  The purpose of this post is also not to degenerate into “Liturgy Wars.”  There are good and holy things happening at Mass, whether it’s a Novus Ordo or the Extraordinary Form.  We are meant to be united, not divided, judging what we do as “better” is like the Gospel from Sunday, Lording ourselves over another.  Jesus specifically asks us not to do this.  Conversion is in the heart and is an act of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit can, and WILL act anywhere.  I also have agonized about whether to print this or not.  I sometimes tend to be impulsive and in hindsight regret my swift action.  I know I will be held to account for every word I speak, so I have learned to be much more careful with what I say and do.  If my interpretation of what God is telling me is wrong, I apologize to God and to all of you.  But in reading today’s Gospel I felt I was called to print this.  In my limited understanding I can only write what I feel God tell me and relay it as best as possible.  This post is meant as a call to prayer, not as a call to shoot poison arrows at one another.  I will not comment on Vatican II, the implementation or the documents, I am not knowledgeable enough.   I also understand that I am out on a limb here so if I get told to take this down I will.  Any comments that shoot poison arrows or claim that “my way is better” I will delete.  With all of this said, I want to relay what happened to me on Saturday, October 13, 2018 at my first High Latin Mass in 26 years.

I went to my first Latin Mass since 1992 on Saturday, October 13, 2018.  I remembered the Latin Mass being beautiful, but this experience was very surreal.  In 1992 the Basilica in DC had permission to do them in their Crypt church, but I was too young and dumb to spiritually grasp what was going on.  I was ignorant back then, and even today, of the history surrounding the Mass changes and the fight of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  For me, we just have different forms of Liturgy that have all been deemed acceptable by the church.  I still feel this way, but I have a new perspective.

Anyway, now we have Latin Mass in my Diocese and in a twist of what I would classify as a fluke, but God probably would not, I found myself at one on that Saturday.  The Mass was a High Latin Mass and was probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, seriously.  Which then made me mad because none of us in the pews knew what we were doing and I was angry at the church authority for ever having taken this form away in the first place, so I mentioned that to God.

I observed a couple of things at the Mass.  Every movement that the Priest made, every movement of his BODY was a movement toward God (not toward the people).   You could clearly see that the Priest was the Guardian, and the Keeper of the Kingdom of Heaven.  It was happening there on the altar.  His mind, his body and his soul, aligned with God’s will as he gestured what was actually something that was handed to Adam in the Garden.  He had Dominion to bring Heaven to us.  Bring Divinity to us.

For me it was like witnessing the Theological Virtues in Action.  Faith, Hope and Charity in alignment with the will of God, those virtues a grace gifted by God.  Everything a movement towards those virtues.  I actually found it to be quite charismatic, though it is probably opposite of what most others think of as charismatic.

So in my anger about the loss of this form of Mass for so long, I said a prayer to God about it.  This Mass had several things our Mass now doesn’t, including the bodily movement of the Priest, the Latin which is a unifying language and the devil hates unity.  By going to the colloquial language we separated people.  We constantly have separate Masses for separate languages.  That’s why the devil hates Latin so much.  It unifies the whole church.  It also had all movement directed towards heaven, instead of towards the people.  The choir was in the back so you couldn’t see them, but only hear their voices which were projected towards the altar.  The Procession was silent, which was very awe inspiring, you could see the reverence.  There were just so many things.   In my spiritual progression I could just see things in a way I had never seen them prior.  God was at the center of this.

After communion I came back and was praying, and I got VERY OVERCOME AND OVERHWELMED.  I felt as though God showed me the timeline of Salvation History, which has happened to me before.  And that when the catechism speaks of the Passion of the Church (CCC 675, 677), that this Passion of the church actually began right after Christ’s Resurrection.  The walk of the timeline of the history of the church is the walk of Christ’s Life, Death and Resurrection.  The Mystical Body will do the same as Christ.  For example, I was shown the early church persecutions and death were parallel to the slaughter of the innocents.  Pentecost was the Nativity.  The Ascension was the Annunciation.  The public ministry of Christ parallel to Constantine legalizing Christianity.  There was so much I was shown, I cannot remember it all.   The rise of Christendom is like when Jesus was out healing publicly and people were in love with him.  We have entered the time period of the corruption of the leadership, in much the same way as the Pharisees were corrupt.  And we have Judases inside the church who are shiny and smiley and “tolerant” on the outside but empty and devoid on the inside. Jesus has become about being nice.  All the while, demons have trained us how to think. Watching all of this was like a movie playing in my head.  And time, it is just different for God, so different than what we know.

Then God turned me towards His mother.  Just as Mary appeared sporadically throughout the Gospels, so too she appears to the Mystical Body throughout the timeline of history.  At his Passion, she was there the whole time, just like she is continually appearing at Medjugorje right now.  I understand that Medjugorje is not an approved apparition and I have spoken about that and about how I will accept whatever the church rules.  I am just speaking about what I feel I was shown, that she is here now, as she was back then.  Her purpose to show us what faith looks like when faith seems impossible.  Hope in the hopeless.  Love for the unlovable.  A human with no divinity doing God’s will.

The stripping down of the Mass, the disunification, this is part of the scourging.  I believe we will enter a time period where the Mass won’t be recognizable and perhaps the Eucharist is gone, in the name of ecumenism.…. We should be ecumenical but not at the expense of truth. I feel like what I was shown was that the church will take on all the worlds sins inside of her.  The way Christ took on our sins inside of Him on the Cross.  It looks like being forsaken.  Almost every Catholic will walk away from the faith.

On Sunday, the day after attending Latin Mass, I went to my regular Novus Ordo Mass.  I felt sad.  We, have humanized the Liturgy so much it becomes about us and how we feel, instead of about the Divine.  Not that it isn’t valid, or even beautiful, God impressed upon me that it is valid and said, “these are my broken people, pray for them”.  What I see is all of us so broken and wounded and hungry that the Mass is about that and about validation of that that it seems like we are not resting in the love of God and being secure in it.  People don’t really believe they’re loved and forgiven, so they’re looking to feel better.

I think the best way to explain it is, the Mass we have now seems to be about emotion and feeling.  The Latin Mass went much deeper and was actually about the Spiritual World being brought to the human world and us receiving it, instead of the reverse.  The key for each of us, no matter the Mass we attend, is to interiorly know who it is we are receiving, and as an act of our will, to ask for union with the will of our Creator.  I am not judging the souls of the people at a Novus Ordo, just making an observation.  I know these souls and they are beautiful, and God loves them and the effort to bring glory to Him.  And we are all following the path the authority set out for us.

And God basically said, this is just the path you’re on and I am walking with you to Calvary.  The last stop— Physical pain.  Just like anything that starts in the spiritual world and takes root in our emotions it moves to our physical body. And that old Mass which aligned all 3, spiritual, emotional and physical with God…this new one doesn’t, though for an individual it can since it’s an interior disposition too.  I will pause here and say too, that even a Protestant can have the interior disposition, but it is much much harder without the physical Eucharist, but because Protestants have relationship with Christ, they can actually be sanctuaries of God (Luke 9:50).  We are all supposed to be living sanctuaries.  What I felt is that God, not people, is supposed to be the center of everything.  If we put God at the center, we actually treat people better, we love like God does because He is the source. But God also told me he has this, and it is part of His plan.  What I felt God showed me, just left me with a feeling of resignation to His plan, knowing it is better for us, but seeing that it will be extremely painful.  He kept telling me to watch for the removal of the Eucharist.

I am not a Liturgist so speaking about this makes me feel ignorant.  I also am not a sedevacantist, the Pope is our authority, needs our prayer, and none of us can know his interior.    What I see is all part of God’s much larger plan to actually have us embrace what Jesus came to teach us… so we can, like Him and through Him put the devil under our feet.  He is the means to that end.  He wants us to have our dominion back, but he is allowing our total breakdown in order to do it because it will be the way we completely surrender.

This is not for me an Old Rite vs. New One.  For me, it just is.  I am told not to judge the souls of the people on this path.  But to pray for them.

When I had this experience it was also clear about obedience to authority. This is something I struggled with.  It’s like Marcel Lefebvre (who I really know very little about, but am trying to relay what God showed me) was correct about not changing the Liturgy, but totally wrong to disobey.  I have a hard time grasping that.  That for something so HUGE, I would have felt the need to fight like he did, but it seems to me God was letting me know he was wrong to do so.  He kept showing me Padre Pio as the example and saying Marcel Lefebvre was right and wrong all at the same time.  It’s about waiting for God, which most of us don’t do.  We take it into our own hands and we try to manipulate God when God has a larger plan at play.

It’s easy to obey a good and holy leader, but when the leader is in open rebellion against God (at least from your perspective)… it’s just very hard to comprehend.  This is not a judgment on Vatican II, again, I cannot know the interior disposition or what was going on at the time.  It’s also why I believe Gods view of blessings and curses are very different from our own.  This is something reading the book of Job taught me.

So to be clear, this is not a condemnation of the current Mass.  God gave the church the authority.  What it binds on earth is bound in heaven.  The question becomes, what are we binding? And for me, this just is the path… the same walk Christ made… and our prayer and sacrifice unite us ever closer to Christ.

It was here when he was talking to me I kept seeing a Fulton Sheen quote, “who is going to save our Church?  Not our Bishops, not our Priests and religious.  It is up to you the people.  You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church.  Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your Bishops act like Bishops, and your religious act like religious.” So there is something the laity is supposed to be doing, as God wills it,  which includes ardently praying, but I couldn’t quite grasp what else.  Our role is different on this walk than that of the clergy.  I am not clear yet on exactly our role besides praying, but there is another role.

With each stripping down of the Mass we have scourged the Mystical Body.  Doctrine will be nailed to the Cross…

You see, God Himself DOES NOT ACTUALLY NEED THE LITURGY.  HE IS PERFECT.  We need the Liturgy to unite us to Divinity.  His humanity and divinity brought to us.  When we stripped the Divinity out of the Mass by “making it easier for us” we humanized everything so much (except at the consecration which brings us both the full humanity and full divinity of God) and became more and more distant from the Creator.  We take on the sins of the world, and eventually we will breathe our last, looking totally dead.  Only a few remaining standing at the foot of the cross.

It was interesting to note that as I was experiencing this, I also learned that April 3, 2019 is 50 years since the institution of the new Mass.  April 3, 33 AD is the date given in the documentary, Star of Bethlehem, as the day of the Cross, the first Good Friday.

God told me that if we really want to know the “signs of the times”, we needn’t look any further than the Mass.  The church is the center of the world.  The way she goes is then echoed out to the world.  Look for changes to the Mass and Scripture if you want to know what happens next.  Scripture is already being changed.   Just after I had this experience I read that China removed all bibles for sale because they are writing one that will conform with the state.

The one thing I feel about Mary, is that back then she stood with her son and will now be standing with us, the Mystical Body to grace us with those theological virtues, which are a gift of grace.   That is why she is the key.  This is the triumph of her Immaculate Heart, she stands with us to see us through to Resurrection.  I have ideas of what this could look like, but I am usually wrong when I try to interpret things on my own.

Know too I feel dumb saying all of this because I am not do not possess the knowledge of history or of liturgy in these areas.  This is all just what I feel I have been told. And I try to interpret as best as I can.

And it’s very overwhelming to look at from my small perspective.

About a week later after writing all of this down about the Latin Mass, I was walking and God kept repeating, “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.” and “what you bind on earth is bound in heaven.”

Let me see if I can explain how that was shown to me.

Some of the things people are doing are objectively mortal sin.

BUT because demons have trained people how to think, many do not know it.  And the church has not taught it for the better part of 50 years.

So when a person is “welcomed” into the church, sitting in that sin, and the authority does nothing to correct it, and tells them they’re forgiven without need of change, they actually are granted the mercy of purgatory based on the authority the church has and their lack of knowledge and understanding.

But there are those in authority do know better (though I suspect there are some who are poorly formed who for one reason or another may not know better).  What they “bind on earth, is bound in heaven.”  They are actually binding curses on the church itself because they’re violating covenant with God.  Which is why we are on a Passion walk.  Many faithful who know and recognize truth will break away from the authority as the church continues on a trajectory against Doctrine and against Christ.  But this isn’t right either.  Christ allowed the authority to take him all the way to death.  And we are supposed to be like Christ.  In the current world scenario this is what I see, I believe the “Herod and Pilate” who are the secular leaders who crucified Christ, is China.  The Judases are the ones who are betraying Christ from the inside by denying His teachings.  But there will be many who will break away from the walk to Calvary in an effort to save themselves, but not others.  Christ wants us all in this together.  The people of God are a communion.

At the core of the church the Holy Spirit is the head, so even if the authority is blind and deaf the ship will be directed the way the Spirit wants and we need to remain on the ship even when we can’t see through the storm.  She will get safely anchored, after this giant storm, between the two pillars of Mary and the Eucharist.

Pray without ceasing for the unity of the church.  Not a false unity, but for unity in TRUTH.