Hymn To Socialism

That describes the offeratory hymn at today's 9:30 Mass at St John Neumann in Gaithersburg, MD.  It's called "Render to Caesar" by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette.  I was singing right along but stopped at this line: "may our taxes, all together, fund our working hand in hand".  It's a sweet, clever paraphrase of this statement: "from each according to his ability to each according to his need".  For the history-deprived, that last piece of mental poison comes to us courtesy of Karl Marx, the long-recognized father of modern socialism.  Socialism has been condemned by many popes.

Seeing this slop coming from this woman, I knew that "when there's smoke, there's fire".  And quite a destructive fire there is, as a simple google search revealed.  She has quite a write-up in wikipedia.  She and her husband are "co-pastors" at Overbrook Presbyterian Church.  Right there we have two problems: 1) the works of a non-Catholic were proffered to our congregation for singing as though they were valid spiritual input; 2) she obviously doesn't understand the concept of only men being permitted to preach.

Going down the wikipedia page, we see that she's written hymns for all sorts of occasions: peace, racial justice, environmentalism, illegal immigrants, natural disasters, etc.  We even see one for superbowl Sunday.  So that pretty much covers all areas of "concern" for Christians, right?  Well, not quite!  But maybe I just overlooked the hymns lamenting abortion, euthanasia, homosexual sin, assaults on marriage and family.  If they exist, please point them out to me in the comment boxes.  If not (and I truly think that's the case), why not?  Sometimes silence and omissions sound the loudest sounds.

Speaking of assaults on life, marriage, and family, our pastor made the point that these are matters that belong to God as opposed to the state.  It was a solid, truthful point.  I regret that the offertory hymn undermined that message.