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.

Subtle Heresies In Hymns At Mass

That is what I encountered last weekend at the 11:15 Mass at St John Neumann in Gaithersburg.  It was one phrase in the Offertory hymn that was so problematic as to be heretical.  I find that often happens in songs with a "social justice" theme.

The hymn was When Jesus Came Preaching by Fred Pratt Green, a now-deceased Methodist minister in England.  Here's the embedded heresy: "so let none of us swerve from our mission to serve that has made us his church from the start".  That phrase displays a totally inverted and perverted view of the Church.  I'll contrast this with some facts from the Baltimore Catechism, facts that I learned in the first grade.  I'll list questions 136-138.

• 136 What is the Church?  The Church is the congregation of all baptized persons united in the same true faith, the same sacrifice, and the same sacraments, under the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops in communion with him.
• 137 Who founded the Church? Jesus Christ founded the Church.
• 138 Why did Jesus Christ found the Church?  Jesus Christ founded the Church to bring all men to eternal salvation.

According to Green, this "mission to serve" caused the church to come into being.  For him, the question isn't even who spawned the Church but what.  In his thinking, Jesus Christ Himself has been substituted by this "mission to serve" as originator of the Church.  This is de facto idolatry.  I'm sure that was not the intention of any of St John's music minstry to promulgate heresy and idolatry, but nonetheless that is in fact what happened, with many decent Catholics in the pews singing this right along, not realizing until too late what was happening (assuming they were alert enough to sense a problem).

Additionally, this "mission to serve" is never quite defined.  Since we did have a guest priest who spoke on behalf of a charity to serve the third-world impovershed (and it sounds like a very good organization), I venture a guess that this song was picked with "social justice" in mind.   Question 138 states quite plainly God's intention for the Church: to facilitate eternal salvation, that is, to save people from hell and get them into heaven.  Any charitable endeavor, important though it is, is ancillary to the salvation of immortal souls.

Too many are losing sight of the primacy of eternal salvation.  Indeed, far too many don't believe in hell and don't seem to care that one unconfessed mortal sin at the time of death will result in eternal damnation.  Jesus spoke about hell many times during His earthly ministry, yet today we rarely (if ever) hear the word "hell" mentioned from the pulpit.  This constitutes a gross disservice to the wayward Catholic in the pew, who will never benefit from the warning to avail him/herself of Confession.  Now that is a true "social injustice", one that will have everlasting consequences.

At any rate, I'd suggest that when we arrive at Mass and are waiting for it to begin, that we give the hymns a glace to make sure that we won't be singing something that doesn't conform to Church Teaching..