I watch so that you don't have to

For people who are curious as to how the "St Mary's [South Brisbane] parish in exile" conducts its masses, they have been posting videos of their services at their website for the last few weeks.

Unfortunately, they only seem to stay up for a week at a time, but I have watched a few of them now.

The latest one, from yesterday, also has the homily in written form.

A few observations:

* I could be wrong, but the latest video indicates a significantly smaller congregation than in the first couple of weeks;

* They never seem to incorporate an Act of Penitence. Given that few Catholics regularly attend confession these days, I would have thought that this part of the Mass served an increasingly useful function (even if it does not, according to the Church, actually give absolution.) But dropping this is typical of the strand of Christianity that preaches social justice as its main theme: they love to tell others about the importance of being fair and nice to everyone, but don't spend a lot of time examining themselves for any sign of "sin". (For them, it's such an outdated, patriarchal sort of concept.)

Of course, you can argue that a lot of damage has been caused to the Church by those who hypocritically preached the rules, but failed to live up to the standards themselves. (The Church's reaction to child abuse in the clergy gets a lot of airtime from those who attend St Mary's.) But (I would argue) from an intellectual point of view, such hypocrisy is not as corrosive to the core of the faith as the modernising Gaia-incorporating semi-realism of the type of faith St Mary's seems to propagate.

* Nor do they seem to bother with the Creed. (I suspect that it is because it would require too many amendments to bear anything close to the original.)

* The Lord's Prayer is incorporated but begins "Our Mother, our Father ..." Does any reader know of any other parish that does this? I know the suggestion has been around for a while, as I recall the late Bede Griffiths came up with it during a talk he gave in Brisbane years ago. But I am not sure if the idea has been adopted anywhere other than St Mary's. (Bede Griffiths was an interesting character, an English Benedictine monk who "went native" in India, but whether he was really operating within Catholic doctrine by the end of his life is very doubtful. I think he just avoided official censure by spending most of his time in India and concentrating on meditation.)

* As you can see from Peter Kennedy's homily (linked above) , he's very big on the whole Gaia-ish, birthing, Creation, life-giving, it's all about relationships, God-(whatever that might be)-just-wants-us-to-be-nice-environmentalists-and-kind-to-gays, view of Christianity.

There seems little doubt that Peter Kennedy would be a fan of Matthew Fox, the former Catholic priest (now Californian Episcopalian) whose pagan incorporating "creation spirituality" brought him a lot of attention a couple of decades ago until he got banned from teaching theology and chucked out of his order by our present Pope. Like Fox, Kennedy like to quote Meister Eckhart, who also was in a spot of doctrinal bother during his life.

Kennedy quotes in his homily another Catholic writer who I hadn't heard of before (Diarmund O'Murchu - his status within the Sacred Heart Missionary Order remains unclear to me) but this from his website indicates he is doctrinally probably already outside of his Church:

Jesus did not come to rescue or redeem us – there is nothing from which we need to be rescued, other than our own patriarchal dysfunctionality which is our problem and not God’s...

In another essay, O'Murchu explains how the term "Kingdom of God" should rendered differently:

And what would we replace it with? John Dominic Crossan (in Borg 1998, 22-55) offers one of the best suggestions I know: a companionship of empowerment.

I can see it now: "Our Mother our Father...thy companionship of empowerment come".

For a priest who complains that his Archbishop is mistaken when he says he is operating outside of the Catholic faith, Peter Kennedy sure spends a lot of time quoting those who are doctrinally radical.

* Kennedy said when he set up his "parish in exile" that it would be reformed with a bigger role for women. Unless it decides that it can ordain its own woman priest (which I reckon it is likely to do sooner or later) it is hard to imagine a bigger women's role than it already seems to have.

It is clearly already a church dominated by feminist critique. At this week's mass, one of the congregation asked them to pray that the Family Law Act go back to taking protection seriously. (Clearly, she is involved in the current advocacy that is trying to get the government to reverse the presumption of shared care for children between parents.) Another women took the opportunity to give a mini lecture on how women giving birth lying down was a terrible patriarchal idea, and indigenous women knew how to do it better.

It's really eye-rolling stuff. I don't see that they are ever going to attract a broader band of followers from within the Church than that they already have, and it will likely dwindle over time as well.

I suspect that it was at the peak of its popularity during the long period of the Howard government, when nearly everyone in the congregation perceived that they had a fundamentally unjust government to rally against. Now that it's Labor all around, and the appeal of hearing an anti-Howard rant every week has gone, one wonders whether it can maintain its appeal.