More Context From San Antonio

A former parishioner at Our Lady of the Atonement adds more context to the current situation in the archdiocese there. My impressions as a fairly new Catholic tend to bear out her view that the Church has been changing more than some people will acknowledge:

When Archbishop Flores presided over San Antonio, the liturgical abuses of even the larger, mainstream parishes were egregious. At one parish I attended, for the feast of Pentecost, a procession (if you could call it that) where some people with fishing pole-type things with strings attached to bird things were waved around vigorously as the people ran up and down the main and side aisles of the church while the congregation sang and clapped, I suppose to evoke the feeling of the Holy Spirit descending like a dove. The feeling it evoked for me was, “You gotta be kidding me.” It was at that same parish the priests all but refused to give communicants the Host on the tongue. I recall once Fr. Tony became so incensed when I refused to put out my hand, he angrily pressed the Host against the side of my face with his thumb, I guess thinking I would have to grab it with my hand after all. Unfortunately for Fr. Tony, I have a pretty dexterous tongue and was able to snake it out and lick the Host off my face. It was a pretty sad spectacle I’m sure.

So, I moved into a new parish. Here the songs were awful, there were always about 12 people behind the priest at the altar for the final elevation as Eucharistic Ministers (which should have been Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion in front of the altar) and lots of milling around. Aside from all the distractions at Mass, this parish also has communal penance services where the congregation would gather, have a few prayers and some scripture readings, maybe a song, then the group would pray aloud a prayer similar to the Confiteor where we admitted we were guilty of sin generally, then the priest would confer absolution on the entire congregation without anyone having to actually confess their sins to the priest. Someone must have pointed out that general absolution without individual confession could only be used in dire circumstances because they later modified the service to have each congregant go up to the priest in a line like for communion and individually confess only one sin, hopefully their most serious, before the general absolution was granted. It was during the parental class for Baptism at this parish we were told the Church no longer believes that one of purposes of Baptism is to wash away Original Sin. Needless to say, I wanted to find a new parish. So we moved again.

My next parish had some serious touchy–feely priests. In addition to all the Eucharistic Ministers they had behind the altar, the clapping and tambourine playing and arms held up swaying during the songs, the priests in this parish were wont to ad lib all through the Mass. During the consecration, these priests, who had banished gender references to God as much as possible, because there were only male disciples I am guessing, would say that Jesus “..broke the bread, gave it to His FRIENDS and said…”. Same thing with the Chalice. And speaking of the chalice, these priests would not use chalices made of precious metals or especially fine crystal but rather simple ceramic vessels because Jesus was just a poor carpenter. Gadzooks! I could hardly get through Mass without some serious unchristian thoughts so I had to find another parish…

Eventually, a brand new parish sprung up that had a conservative priest, who offered a reverent OF Mass and had a lovely small choir. It was difficult to go to this Church as it was not close and family members who had grown up with all the liturgical abuses and did not know any better were not very supportive. There were so few other Catholics that I knew in any of the parishes I attended that even recognized any of these things as abuse of the Liturgy that I was mocked and belittled because when I mentioned them or pointed them out, I “thought I was more Catholic than the Pope” and “knew more than the priests who were actually saying Mass”. Well, perhaps I did, but then came Abp. Jose Gomez. In the extremely short time he was in San Antonio, these Liturgical abuses were discontinued, phased out and otherwise reversed. It was wonderful. We were able to return to our home parish. Of course, there were lots of folks who did not understand that those things were abusive and pushed back hard on the changes and still do. Unfortunately, when Abp. Gomez moved to LA, the attention to those things began to wane. Abp. Garcia-Siller coasted for awhile along the path Abp. Gomez charted but then Abp. Gustavo, as he likes to be called, began to create his own legacy which seems to be studied silence on difficult moral or theological issues and speaking out occasionally about some political issue now and again. Don’t get me wrong, Abp. Gustavo has done some really good things for San Antonio like opening up a confessional downtown that is open almost all day every day of the week. What a blessing! On the whole though, we don’t hear much from our Archbishop unless he is asking for money. But the seeds of reform had already sprouted and now are beginning to grow and blossom.

My experience is not unique. That is why Fr. Phillips was able to attract “disaffected” Catholics, because there really were so few options available in San Antonio when he arrived in the mid 1980s. With Abp. Gomez, things changed but that wasn’t until 2005. More and more parishes and priests began then to become more reverent, more uniform, more in line with Catholic doctrine and social teaching. Parishes began to offer Adoration and Bible study programs promulgated by Bp. Baron and Jeff Cavins and the like. As that occurred, most of the disaffected Catholics had the opportunity to return to their old parishes and a lot of them did. The need to seek out a “boutique Liturgy” which was really a desire for most folks to find a non-abusive Liturgy began to dry up. The abuses at OLA were not Liturgical but they were abuses, of finances, of personnel, of defiance of authority. Then, when Abp. Gustavo finally put the entire force of his authority down on the real abuses at Our Lady of Atonement, that’s when it all hit the fan. The people who could not recognize that Abp. Gomez and Abp. Gustavo were not Abp. Flores were still treating the Archdiocese like it was filled with heretics and heathens and would not let it go. And Fr. Phillips used and fanned that sentiment because it furthered his own devices. Fr. Lewis, sadly, is just left holding the bag, facing a changing demographic of parishioners and a dwindling supply of disaffected Catholics to draw from. This seems to be the trend all over the US which might explain why the search for disaffected Catholics has become almost frantic in the Ordinariate: because there are fewer and fewer of them to fight over.

So, in a nutshell, if you think that what you see now and have experienced in the Catholic Church or in the parishes in the LA area are what it has been like in the parishes in San Antonio over the last 30+ years, you are waaaaay off base. The struggle is real! But the Church will always find its way home. And in San Antonio it has been a loooong time coming, but coming it is.