A few weeks ago we approached a shocking reading in the liturgy during Mass, and I waited to see how it would be delivered.* [Ephesians 5:22 and following verses]
...
But I never got to hear the passage read in Church at Mass. The middle-aged lady who was on duty to read that day stopped short and refused to continue the reading to the end. There was a pause; and a silence. I looked up to see if it was a dramatic pause? It wasn’t. It was the pause of abandonment. She approached the shocking words of the climax of the Pauline mystery of the mutuality of self-surrender, and stopping short, she turned away and left the lectern several sentences too early.
I was indeed shocked; but not by the text. Instead by the determination of the guardians of ‘progressive church’ to protect our ears from the unthinkable.
Dr. Ashenden, to the Vatican in Exile, you are Monsignor Ashenden.** And I presume that kind of female lector is still not allowed among us.
Just saying./HGL
* From Dr. Gavin Ashenden's substack today. ** Episcopal line of Duarte Costa, same as Pope Michael I.
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