ktm said:
WOW that’s quite a charge! I guess next you’ll tell us we’re all going to Hell.
I usually enjoy reading your posts on the CA Forums, but this thread has been a real disappointment. Whether you realize it or not, you are coming across as being very self-righteous.
## I would still worry about the priest first:
**1. The priest is a person, made in image of Christ - the Blessed Sacrament is not a person. **
2. St. Philip Neri was always ready to interrupt his prayers to Christ, in order to help Christ in His servants: he had no time for the sort of piety which ignores human need by pleading the need of obedience to the first of the two great commendments.
**3. To ignore Christ in our neighbour in favour of Christ in the Eucharist, is too close to putting pious practices before people in need; and one’s own increase in grace over one’s neighbour’s need - we will
lose the growth in grace we seek, if we are not
prepared to lose it by doing what may seem less devout and less directly related to Christ. We will lose one of the main fruits of the Eucharist: active love of our neighbour in his weakness and need. To that, liturgical correctness is altogether secondary. **
**4. Devotion as such, is less important than the ethical test of that devotion: whether our devotions make us readier to love Christ in our negihbour - if not, they are not worth much. **
**5. Piety can become a means of dodging our responsibilities to others: Jesus was very severe against this: **
**Mar 7:1 Now when the Pharisees gathered together to him, with some of the scribes, who had come from Jerusalem, **
**Mar 7:2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. **
**Mar 7:3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; **
**Mar 7:4 and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they purify themselves; and there are many other traditions which they observe, the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze.) **
**Mar 7:5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?” **
**Mar 7:6 And he said to them, "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; **
**Mar 7:7 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’ **
**Mar 7:8 You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men." **
**Mar 7:9 And he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition!
Mar 7:10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die’; **
**Mar 7:11 but you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, What you would have gained from me is Corban’ (that is, given to God) –
**Mar 7:12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, **
**Mar 7:13 thus making void the word of God through your tradition which you hand on. And many such things you do."
**Mar 7:14 And he called the people to him again, and said to them, "Hear me, all of you, and understand: **
**Mar 7:15 there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him." ## **
Gosh, the last time someone collapsed during our Mass, what did I do? I ran outside! OK, so it was to help guide the paramedics, since I was close to the door. Then I came back in to play hymns softly on the organ to cover the otherwise awkward silence interrupted by staccato emanations from the paramedics’ radios, until Mass got resumed. The priest never left the altar. The fallen person was well taken care of by others.