I feel like I am very well catechized. I was attending mass on Thursdays at my catholic center where the priest would have us stand in a circle around the altar and pass around the Eucharist so that we could self communicate. I thought there was something “off” about this (like possibly it was illicit) but I certainly didn’t think it was grave matter.
The major sin was the priest’s. But if you were pretty sure that it was illicit, well illicit=sinful. Once you got the idea that it was probably wrong (which probably came from the Holy Spirit), then you could have looked it up and found out. The first time, it probably wasn’t a sin at all for you, but after the first time, if you thought it was probably wrong, well a quick google search with “catholic self-communicate” gives a bunch of pages with the answer. So it may well have been a venial sin that you never bothered to check.
However, I’m not a priest, and as I said before, your venial sins have already been absolved.
But I also think that I have the right to a properly-celebrated mass,
Certainly you do. It’s one of the freedoms that those liturgical “innovators” take away from people in the name of freedom.
and when i find myself in the position of participating in one where not every single minute detail is correct, I don’t see how I could be blamed.
Sorry, that really wasn’t a minute detail. It was, unless I’m mistaken, two different kinds of grave matter. A small detail is that you shouldn’t have been standing around the altar at all. OTOH, the fact that someone who was neither an ordinary minister of Holy Communion (priest or deacon), nor was someone approved by the Bishop as an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion, was handing communion to another lay person was one kind of grave matter, and the fact that the person who received it was then self-communicating was another. (I may be wrong about that counting twice, but certainly either one alone is very bad.) However, IANACL.*
It is the priest’s responsibility and not mine to do what needs to be done correctly at a mass – I can hardly imagine that every single Catholic knows what is illicit/unlawful at a mass.
Certainly the priest was responsible for illicitly changing the Mass to suit his own purposes. However, it is also every Catholic’s responsibility to know at least the places where grave errors may take place. You might try reading
Mass Confusion by Jimmy Akin. It’s unfortunate that priests cannot all be trusted to celebrate the Mass properly, but that is the world we are living in, and we have to deal with it by informing ourselves, or it won’t get better.
Anyway, you aren’t responsible for every single Catholic. Every single Catholic doesn’t even know that artificial birth control is wrong, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to know it.
It doesn’t matter what happened before, because it’s over, and it’s been absolved. But if you inform yourself about what is supposed to happen in Mass and what emphatically isn’t, then you are ready for whatever happens in the future, and you may even be the means of helping others not to sin.
I’m not saying that you have to do all of that to keep out of Hell. But I’m sure you want to serve God as well as you can, according to your abilities and the access to information that you have been blessed with as one of the few spiritual advantages of our modern western society.
–Jen
*I am not a Canon Lawyer.
But I also think that I have the right to a properly-celebrated mass, and when i find myself in the position of participating in one where not every single minute detail is correct, I don’t see how I could be blamed. It is the priest’s responsibility and not mine to do what needs to be done correctly at a mass – I can hardly imagine that every single Catholic knows what is illicit/unlawful at a mass. And it is in this context that I participated in the passing around of the precious blood and Eucharist. Of course, if I had known that the priest was doing something grave, I would have done something about it long ago. But I didn’t think to ask until a week ago. Don’t see how I could be faulted for that 