Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
We hope you enjoy your visit!
You're currently viewing Catholic CyberForum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our online cyberparish, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.
Join our community!
Messages posted to this board must be polite and free of abuse, personal attacks, blasphemy, racism, threats, harrassment, and crude or sexually-explicit language.
If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Locked Topic
"special Masses" For "special Groups"
Topic Started: Monday, 19. February 2007, 02:26 (258 Views)
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
On another thread, also in the Lower House, there has been some discussion about "Mass for Homosexuals". I was all for those Masses until I received a private message from a fellow member asking me how I, married to a man who has some disabilities, feel about "Masses for the Disabled and Housebound".

That private message led me to change my mind.

Why should any group be selected for a special Mass? Every Mass is for all. We all gain something from every Mass, and if things are done right we all have the opportunity to contribute to our parish. Our community is where we live, not in some church a hundred or miles away.

We could have "Mass for Former Prisoners", "Mass for the Mentally Ill", "Mass for Women who Regret Having Abortions".

Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
My own view is:



If I had no legs

I would attend Mass locally and do my best to get actively involved.

If I were hom osex ual

I would attend Mass in my local church and do my best to get actively involved, and (hopefully) I would fight temptation (with the help of God).

If I were housebound

I would not be at any Mass, because people who are able to travel by car are not housebound.

If I was considered to be a member of any minority group

I would take the attitude "So what? We are all different in one way or another."

So why do they have SPECIAL MASSES FOR.......................anybody?
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Angus Toanimo
Member Avatar
Administrator
Rose of York
Feb 19 2007, 01:26 AM
On another thread, also in the Lower House,  there has been some discussion about "Mass for Homosexuals".  I was all for those Masses until I received a private message from a fellow member asking me how I, married to a man who has some disabilities, feel about "Masses for the Disabled and Housebound".


It's what is known as 'positive discrimination', isn't it? On the one hand, the Cardinal says that the Catholic Church condemns discrimination of homosexuals but then invites them to a Mass provided by his Diocese, which positively discriminates against the hom osex ual.

I really do think this has been released - a knee-jerk reactioin to the controversy of the Catholic Adoptions Agencies row and the SORs legislation.

"We accept the fact you're gay and can have access to the sacraments. But, we have laid on a special Mass for you, so that you don't have to put up with heterosexuals sitting in the pews with you. Because none of you good Catholic homosexuals would even dream of adopting a Catholic child, there will be no Childrens Liturgy of the Word at these Masses."

Quote:
 
Why should any group be selected for a special Mass?  Every Mass is for all.  We all gain something from every Mass, and if things are done right we all have the opportunity to contribute to our parish.  Our community is where we live, not in some church a hundred or miles away.

We could have "Mass for Former Prisoners", "Mass for the Mentally Ill", "Mass for Women who Regret Having Abortions".


We could have a Mass for kleptomaniacs - but instead of the collection plate starting off empty, it would start loaded with money...

:D
Posted Image
Posted Image
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Angus Toanimo
Member Avatar
Administrator
Seriously, I am all for 'Polish Masses' but Masses laid on specifically for sections of society - such as homosexuals, disabled people, and so on, I feel is counterproductive.

Would a hom osex ual really feel comfortable at a Mass 'specially for him/her' as part of Westminster's program of 'outreach' to the Catholic gay community?

Likewise, would a disabled person feel happy in the knowledge that his/her bishop has set aside time for them to have a 'Mass for the disabled'?

I don't think so.

Or would these people be far better off knowing that they can attend their local parish church without labels being pinned to them before they even get there?

Whilst the Cardinal is providing Masses for homosexuals, Churches are closing due to a shortage of priests.
Posted Image
Posted Image
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Angus Toanimo
Member Avatar
Administrator
Rose of York
Feb 19 2007, 01:57 AM
If I were hom osex ual

I would attend Mass in my local church and do my best to get actively involved, and (hopefully) I would fight temptation (with the help of God).



Not...

Attending a special Mass for homosexuals in a designated Church, getting involved, and (eventually) succumbing to temptation (with the help of the Cardinal).

How about:

'SPECIAL MASS FOR UNMARRIED HETEROSEXUALS'.

Well, they have to fight temptation. Who better to hear their confessions, than a heterosexual priest who fights temptation? He knows what they go through.

:wh:

Next up....

'SPECIAL MASS FOR CO-HABITING COUPLES

Though Heterosexual, don't want to get married, but live together and have normal sexual relationships. We dont want them to feel excluded, so they will be given a special Mass.'


Lord, please grant me the strength and courage to resist the temptation of carrying on with this.
Posted Image
Posted Image
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
Patrick
Feb 19 2007, 02:23 AM
Likewise, would a disabled person feel happy in the knowledge that his/her bishop has set aside time for them to have a 'Mass for the disabled'?

I don't think so.

Special time, or as is usual, special time and special place.

I think the idea of Special Masses for any supposedly "disadvantaged groups" is ghastly. There is no need for them.
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Gerry2
Member Avatar

Patrick
Feb 19 2007, 02:23 AM
would a disabled person feel happy in the knowledge that his/her bishop has set aside time for them to have a 'Mass for the disabled'?

Patrick - I hear what you're saying, but I remember in my parish in Glasgow in the 70's the SVDP would have a Mass for the sick and housebound once a year, where all the stops were pulled out to have people who usually couldn't get to Mass brought in - favours called in, consciences tweaked, arms twisted, etc. The Sacrament of the Sick was given during the Mass, and there was tea for everybody who wanted it afterwards. Sometimes it was the only time in a year when some folk would see the folks they grew up with. I think it was a good thing.

Gerry2
Love is as strong as death (Songs 8:6)
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Deacon Robert
Member Avatar

We have Masses during the year to honor or support certain "groups". Around St Valentines day there is a Mass for newlyweds and those with significant anniversaries (including widows and widowers, who wish to be added), on the feast of OL of Guadalupe we ask all women who are expecting to come foreward for a blessing. We regularly have a triduum for cancer patients and survivors where they recieve sacramental annointing and a blessing using a relic from St. Peregrine.
The burden of life is from ourselves, its lightness from the grace of Christ and the love of God. - William Bernard Ullanthorne

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
Gerry2
Feb 20 2007, 01:10 PM
Patrick
Feb 19 2007, 02:23 AM
would a disabled person feel happy in the knowledge that his/her bishop has set aside time for them to have a 'Mass for the disabled'?

Patrick - I hear what you're saying, but I remember in my parish in Glasgow in the 70's the SVDP would have a Mass for the sick and housebound once a year,..................................................................................................Sometimes it was the only time in a year when some folk would see the folks they grew up with. I think it was a good thing.

Gerry2

Gerry, in the seventies it was a good thing, to make a special effort to help people get to Mass occasionally. Buildings were not fully accessible and hardly anybody had a car.

Times have changed. Most of us now have cars, so any parishioner who is unable to drive, should be able to get a lift, Sunday after Sunday. Therefore, nowadays, few who are not terminally ill, are housebound. A person who is physically able to get to a Special Mass for Housebound, would not be able to get there if they were housebound.

As for disabled people, gone are the days when people were unable to enter buildings because they were faced with six steps. Nowadays, surely they should be able to enter their parish churches whenever they feel like it, and have the opportunity to play a full active part in parish life. Indoors we should have whatever facilities are needed.

Yes, I consider that Mass for the Disabled and Housebound is unnecessary and patronising.

Most physically disabled people drive their own cars nowadays.

Perry
Feb 19 2007, 07:21 PM

But I would like to give my praise to the Parish Priest of my Grampa's Church on the Isle of Bute.  I would not say that he is "housebound" necessarily, but he is in his mid 80s and struggles with mobility.  To his immense credit he tries to venture out every day for a short walk with the assistance of wheeled zimmer like frame.  But he cannot attend Mass because he simply cannot sit in a pew for any length of time, since he has extremely bad arthritis in his back.

Copied from another thread. For want of a chair a man has to stay away from Mass.
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
Deacon Robert
Feb 20 2007, 04:16 PM
We have Masses during the year to honor or support certain "groups". Around St Valentines day there is a Mass for newlyweds and those with significant anniversaries (including widows and widowers, who wish to be added), on the feast of OL of Guadalupe we ask all women who are expecting to come foreward for a blessing. We regularly have a triduum for cancer patients and survivors where they recieve sacramental annointing and a blessing using a relic from St. Peregrine.

That sounds good. They are special Masses to celebrate special occasions, or give support in difficult circumstances. They do not marginalise or exclude, because the attendees are able to be regular Mass goers in their own parishes.

I would like to see an annual Diocesan Mass for couples who have been married for 50 years or more, and include widows and widowers who were married for half a century. Those people give a fine witness to youngsters, that with the grace of God, and human effort, marriages can survive a lifetime.
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
Independent Catholic News
 


LONDON - 20 February 2007 - 200 words

Westminster: Cardinal to meet Neocatechumenal community


Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, will meet with the priests and lay people of the Neocatechumenal communities of the Diocese on Saturday, in order to hear about their experiences and share his own hopes for the pastoral development of the diocese.

In the meeting, at Ealing Abbey, at which he will be accompanied by his auxiliary bishops, the Cardinal will reflect on the five priorities he set out in 'Communion and Mission', the White Paper on diocesan renewal published in 2006. He will also outline the work being undertaken by the Diocese of Westminster's newly established 'Agency for Evangelisation'. Headed by Fr Michael O'Boy, the Agency has recently launched 'A Holy Nation', a daily meditation and group reflection faith sharing resource for Lent.

Cardinal Cormac said: "This meeting with members of the Neocatechumenal Way will provide an opportunity to share ideas, successes and concerns The vision outlined in Communion and Mission was of a growing togetherness in our Diocese, and I hope that through this meeting we can further deepen our unity."

The Neocatechumenal Way started in Westminster in 1977, in the Parish of Guardian Angels, Mile End, with the support of Bishop Victor Guazzelli. Today it is present in four parishes with 20 communities.

Source: Diocese of Westminster 


We can pick and mix from Neocatechumenates' Mass, at which the bread consecrated was made in the home of a member, who sang a psalm whilst preparing the dough, Mass for a Charismatic Renewal Day, with lots of "joy", Tridentine Mass offered for members of Latin Mass Society, or we can get up on Sunday morning and just toddle off to "Mass." The choice is ours.
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Eve
Former Admin/Moderator
Independent Catholic News
 
LONDON - 20 April 2007 - 1,450 words

Text: Fr Philip Endean SJ at Soho Mass

Fr Philip Endean SJ, Editor of The Way, gave the following homily at the Mass for London's gay community on Sunday at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Warwick Street.


Today's liturgy gives us two contrasting pictures of Christ's disciples after Easter. The first reading is one of the passages early in the Acts of the Apostles where Luke is speaking of a harmonious band of believers. Earlier, we've been told that they are united heart and soul, sharing all that they have in common. Now we hear of them coming together in the portico of Solomon, re-enacting the ministry of Jesus. Just as the sick strove to touch the hem of Jesus' garment, so here they seek to fall under Peter's shadow. The resurrection of Jesus generates a fellowship of peace, a peace that radiates healing.

John's gospel strikes a different note. It speaks of disciples gathered in hiding. The doors are locked, for fear of the Jews. And it is on this picture that I want to concentrate, at least for the next few minutes. After all, even in Luke the harmony did not last: they had to cope with believers who began to withhold their cash, and had to put some authority structures in place, and much more importantly they had to struggle with the issues raised by Paul's conversion and subsequent ministry.

There are, of course, some poignant similarities between John's disciples and ourselves. We're not behind locked doors-but outside the church there are people peacefully demonstrating who in all sincerity and conviction think it profoundly wrong that a liturgy like this should take place. And previous experience has led us to be anxious about what they might do to disrupt our gathering.

The point is that the grace and gospel of the risen Christ addresses a broken world, a fragmented community. It's not something we just behold and adore; it's something which engages with the realities of sin among us, with the struggles that sin is already unleashing within us. Somehow it has to touch this reality. This is what is happening when Christ appears to his frightened disciples. It is in this context that Thomas cries out in worship, 'my Lord and my God': the strongest and most explicit statement in the New Testament about the identity of Jesus. Jesus, risen from the dead, invites Thomas the frightened disciple, and in him all of us, to thrust his hand into the wounds and wiggle it around (the Greek words are intensely physical). And this physical Jesus, risen from the dead, is both Lord and God.

I don't think it is any accident that the revelation of Christ's risen glory comes in just these terms to a community feeling itself under pressure. The insight happens in the way it does precisely because the people who are given it are living in painful conflict. John's Christianity is still within Judaism-historically it is before the parting of the ways between Jews and believers in Christ. But clearly the Johannine believers have to reckon with the possibility of being thrown out of the synagogue (we get the technical legal term in the story of the man born blind in chapter 9). Their Lord had come to his own, and his own had not accepted him. And his servants in the Johannine Church who have remembered and preserved this story are no different from their master: they live with the prospect of an hour coming when people will kill them and think they are doing service to God.

Why does this conflict happen? When Christ comes as a herald of God's boundless love and the fullness of revelation, he provokes a crisis in all who hear his word. People have to decide whether or not to accept his stupendous, scandalous message-and in doing so they reveal the truth about themselves. It's a conflictual business. And it is to a community rocked by such conflicts that the risen Jesus, the First and the Last, the living One who holds the keys of death and Hell, appears-appears to console, confirm, mission his beleaguered disciples.

The sheer strength of his message is tailored to the disciples' discouragement. The Jewish establishment had promised sure and tested ways to God, a range of sacred mediations of the divine: the Law, the various observances of Temple and Sabbath. But they have not worked, and now something greater is here. Jesus is not just the way to the Father: Jesus and the Father are one. Jesus is Lord and God-just is God. No longer are we speaking of ways to God, mediations of God: God's own self is present, in the utterly tangible, if mysterious, reality of a risen body. The conflict brings this reality out; it is because of the conflict that the revelation emerges. It is because the available religious structures are found wanting that Jesus can become manifest, absolutely reliable, gloriously physical.

The relevance of this message is all too obvious for believers today who feel oppressed by the strength of others' commitment. The risen Jesus is there for us, triumphantly there, even when our fellow believers desert us, and seek to thrust us to the margins. And maybe this is all that should be said to this community today. But I'd like nevertheless to venture a little further, into territory that might be yet more difficult. Something, I think, also needs to be said about the quality of hope we need to maintain.

If God's Word addresses human brokenness and sinfulness, then, as liberation theologians like Jon Sobrino remind us, it is those most obviously and immediately touched by those realities-the poor, the marginalized, the outcast-who have a privileged role in conveying the truth of grace. It's not surprising, therefore, that this gospel, and this kind of theology, encounters resistance, the protest that surely God's Word is for everyone, not just for the poor. And this protest is not false-merely the exaggeration of a truth: the truth that though conflict and partiality may figure large at the outset of the story, John's Jesus is the agent of a God who gives his Son out of love for the world; and he dies in order to gather into unity all the scattered children of God.

The Gospels and early Christianity are seared by the conflicts between the disciples of Jesus and other Jews. It has taken the unspeakable reality of Auschwitz, of the Shoah, the outrage (why we use the sacred word 'Holocaust' in this connection is beyond me) to wake us up to the antagonisms at the very root of our tradition. But the grace that liberates us is grace from a God whose sun shines on the bad and the good alike, and whose will is that we should love our enemies, doing good to those who hate us.

There is an aggressive competitiveness behind how John imagines Jesus: what we've got is no mere mediator of the kind that the Jews are so proud of; what we've got is the Word who is God, the one who has come down from heaven and tells us of what he has seen and heard there, the one to whom God has really entrusted all things. Now, there's a truth here, obviously-but perhaps we need to move beyond the partisan ways in which John encourages us to think about it. The conflicts surrounding Christianity in its origins, like the conflicts surrounding this community here, can only, in God's sight, be provisional. As grace comes to grip us, we can, gradually, let go of the conflicts. And perhaps Luke's vision becomes important here-not as an account of what once might have been, but of the community that is God's promise for our ultimate future.

When Jesus' Word first touches us, it engages with the violence in our sinful society, and cannot but be expressed in ways reflecting that violence-even as it counteracts it. But if we let that Word abide in us, make its home in us, then we can gradually take down those barriers that we erect for fear of the Jews in our day. Their threats will come to mean nothing to us, because of the joy we have been given which is complete, because of the joy that no-one can take from us. If we are believers, if we have life in Jesus' name, then gradually our hearts will be expanded-we will come to love with God's own love, and we will indeed be united heart and soul, not only among ourselves, but also with all God's people, with all God's creation, even with those who are persecuting us.
Howdy Folks. Has anybody seen my husband lately?
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Derekap
Member Avatar

I can understand there are people, including Catholics, who have strong homosex ual feelings. We should as far as possible be as sociable with them as with those who have no such feelings. We should avoid making fun of them or making uncharitable remarks. Obviously the priests will need to react carefully during their Confessions.

However, in these days of pro-hom osex ual propaganda and encouragement as a normal way of life the idea of a public Holy Mass for such people is in danger of giving the signal that The Catholic Church approves.

They obviously need special prayers and our prayers to support them in their problems and they should be assured of the Church's and our support. Perhaps an occasional speech to an appropriate meeting which is published or a statement to the media when the discussion arises may help.

It is a subject which has to treat sufferers with consideration but which must not be confused with disapproving and condemning open pro-homosexuality activity.

(The system seems to be preventing me from correcting the h word spacing!)
Derekap
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
« Previous Topic · Archived Discussions · Next Topic »
Locked Topic