As noted here, Charlotte Bishop Michael Martin has asserted that, “To instruct the faithful that kneeling [while receiving Holy Communion] is more reverent than standing is simply absurd."
I've said this many times before, masonic forces seek to subvert the Church from within and to create a 'new church' created in the image and likeness of man. The new humanitarian religion will result from a quiet revolution within the Church. This new religion will be anti-supernatural. And it will embrace the Socialistic New World Order and the Reign of Antichrist. This is the false church Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich saw in her visions.
In this false church within the True Church, the cancer within the Mystical Body of Christ, there is a loss of the sense of the sacred. Which is why Fr. Miceli wrote that, "Much of the new liturgy has been drained of the numinous and the sacred. The new forms are without splendor, flattened, undifferentiated. Why was kneeling replaced by standing? Jesus himself fell on his knees and on his face as he prayed to his heavenly Father. Satan too knows the meaning of worship and man's need for it. He tried to get Jesus to fall down and worship him. Why has the liturgical year and the Mass been so unfortunately mutilated against the wishes of the faithful? In fact, the faithful are now confused about the Mass, the feast of the saints, the holy seasons. Why was the Gloria, that prayer of total consecration on God's Majesty and Goodness, restricted practically to Sundays alone, and only to those Sundays outside of Lent? Moreover, is the faith really renewed and vivified by by obscuring our sense of community with the Christians of apostolic and ancient times? The new liturgy no longer draws us into the true experience of reliving the Life of Christ. We are deprived of this experience through the elimination of the hierarchy of feasts and the at random changing of the dates of famous feasts....
Then too, the new forms are the result of experimentation. But one experiments with things, with objects that one wants to analyze. Experimentation is the method of science. The wretched idolatry and vulgarity of tinkering with sacred realities has, unfortunately, penetrated the Church and produced a mediocrity-ridden liturgy, a show for spectators that distracts from the holy, frustrates intimate communion with God and trivializes, where it does not suppress, sacred actions, symbols, music and words.
In reality, such diminished liturgies have renewed nothing. Rather these innovations have emptied churches, dried up vocations to the priesthood and sisterhood, driven off converts and opened the doors wide to a flood of renegades. Even though valid in its essence, such a new liturgy cannot inspire for it is colorless, artificial, banal, without the odor and flavor of sanctity. A humanized and popularized, man-oriented liturgy will never produce saints. Only a divinized, God-oriented liturgy can accomplish that miracle. One suspects that many priests realize the banality of the new liturgy. That is why they often become, during the Mass and other ceremonies, actors and entertainers. They put on a show in order to gain the attention of the congregation. These comedians in chasubles preach a utopian Christianity rather than the true Christianity. Their treasure is man rather than God; their emphasis this-worldly rather than other-worldly; their goal progress rather than sanctity; their apostolate is immanent rather than transcendent; their means to their goal is the way of revolution rather than the way of the cross; they preach a secular Church instead of the Sacred Church founded by Christ; the essence of their morality is self-assertion rather than self-denial; the Christ they present to the congregation is the Humanist Christ rather than the God-Man crucified Christ...they genuflect before the world and stand before Christ...they are moved by resentment and envy instead of radiating the joy of Christ.."
In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote: "..there is a story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain Abba Apollo. He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.
But I do not want to go into more detail. I should like to make just one more remark. The expression used by Saint Luke to describe the kneeling of Christians (theis ta gonata) is unknown in classical Greek. We are dealing here with a specifically Christian word. With that remark, our reflections turn full circle to where they began. It may well be that kneeling is alien to modern culture — insofar as it is a culture, for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer knows the one before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture. The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ Himself."
So then, for Bishop Martin, Pope Benedict XVI, who taught that kneeling is an "intrinsically necessary gesture," was being "ridiculous."
Perhaps now is the time for Bishop Martin to get on his knees and pray for some humility. For he cannot hold a candle to the genius and spiritual greatness of Pope Benedict XVI.
