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If you are too lazy to click the link or the link is no longer valid, here's a couple of quotes from the article: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