So he addressed it just before Mass started. He started by saying that since his arrival he had noticed two things in our parish that he didn’t see anywhere else. First he dealt with the lack of reverence for Christ in the Tabernacle and asked us to remember His presence, reminding us that is indicated by the burning lamp in the sanctuary, and to please genuflect before slipping into our pew.
Then he said he couldn’t understand why we didn’t kneel for the Consecration and instructed us to kneel from the end of the Sanctus to after the Amen. He seemed almost embarrassed to have to mention these things but in the end I’m sure he made 98% of those who were there happy.
Eventually I may inform him of how we came to be ‘non-kneelers’: someone bullied a former pastor into it. Two women, the diocesan catechetical coordinator (one of our parishioners) and the parish administrator, waged a campaign to stop kneeling during Mass. When that succeeded and the Pastor finally let them have their way, they tried to have the kneelers removed, supposedly to ‘save the carpet’. I suggested that they had to poll the parishioners to see how they felt about it and in the end there was such an outcry that the kneelers stayed, but for the most part they were unused during Mass.
