Serious Problem for Catholic Church

The Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times had a front page article dealing with a Catholic Church issue, an issue so serious and divisive that it is threating the very core of the church. Wow, you say, they are finally coming to grips with child molestation? Uh, well, not quite. Close, though. There is a huge controversy down in Orange County because some parishoners are insisting on kneeling after the Agnus Dei time in the service!

Here is the link to the article (although it will not be valid after about a month or so): click here.

If you are too lazy to click the link or the link is no longer valid, here's a couple of quotes from the article:

At a small Catholic church in Huntington Beach, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner?

Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran's anti-kneeling edict.

Though told by the pastor and the archdiocese to stand during certain parts of the liturgy, a third of the congregation still gets on its knees every Sunday.

The article goes on the cite opinions on both sides of the issue. Please read the article for the details. Suffice it to say, don't these people have anything better to do with their time??? Does anyone really think that God cares if you stand or kneel before Him?

1 Samuel 16:7 says this:

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

To put this in context, the prophet Samuel was searching for the future king of Israel and had sifted through the candidates and thought he found the right one when he spotted a very royal-looking man. But God directed him otherwise, and led him to David.

Likewise, don't you think that God cares more about what is in the hearts of the people as they come before him, rather than whether they are standing, sitting, kneeling or lying on their stomachs? And the Diocese of Orange has gone so far as to declare the act of kneeling at an inappropriate time to be a mortal sin. Yup, that's right - mortal. Right up there with murder. I think they might be petitioning at this very moment to rewrite the book of Exodus and make this the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not kneel after the Agnus Dei.

Well I tell you something - to these folks who are on the hotseat now because of their refusal to stand instead of kneeling - it's too bad that you didn't decide to go out and molest some children instead because chances are, the Catholic Church would just look the other way instead of threatening to boot you out (and they already have kicked some out). They only have time to focus on the real issues within the Church!

Click It or Ticket - WOW!

I must commend the creative savant at Caltrans who brainstormed the latest clever phrase that graces the electronic traffic message signs lining our Southern California freeways. As we took a nice drive on this Memorial Day 2006, we were reminded every few miles by these signs to "CLICK IT OR TICKET." Isn't it nice to know that our tax dollars are being put to such good use? Thank you, Caltrans!

Now I must admit that the Amber Alerts that appear on those same electronic signs have been useful; they have resulted in the safe return of abducted children. And one can argue that just saving one innocent life like that justifies the cost of the signs. Being a parent, I can certainly understand that way of thinking. But does that mean that we can't use the non-Amber alert time for something more useful than either a blank board or, what might be even worse, CLICK IT OR TICKET???

Briefly a few months ago, I could look at the sign near the freeway onramp when leaving work and it would tell me the estimated time to a couple of destinations. But for some reason that information disappeared, replaced with either the familiar blank screen or that dumb message I won't bother to print again. Why would they get rid of that ETA info? Because the people working at Caltrans were too lazy to deal with anything that was dynamic instead of static? Because someone got a cheap sleazy lawyer to file a lawsuit because their client relied on the information on that board and was late a few minutes?

Well for whatever the reason, the bottom line is that it is a shame to have to look up at these underutilized wonders of technology each day and be reminded of how our tax dollars are misused.