The elderly priest’s voice is strong and untouched by melancholy. The cares of old age don’t weigh upon him. To Msgr. Topper, there is little difference between the earthly life and life eternal, “because when you are ordained, you are in heaven.”
On Harrisburg, PA’s Msgr Topper, the oldest and longest-serving priest in the US. At the National Catholic Register.
I was talking to a priest last week, and among other things I mentioned how the catechesis I’d received in RCIA was very, very firm on the point that there should be absolutely no private prayer during mass. Instead, all attention should be immediately focussed ‘on the action’ being carried out. I’d been very perturbed by this, because what is prayer? Just putting myself in God’s presence and meditating on that feels like prayer, and if I get some kind of spiritual thought that’s just my own, that’s wrong? So I had asked one of the sponsors in my group if she didn’t also think that this prohibition was fairly tyrannical, and she’d said, “Don’t question Father. You know he’s a liturgical expert.”
When I retold this story, the priest laughed–as the tyranny of the ‘Vatican II liturgical expert’ is a phenomenon the whole world over–and quipped, “Well, I’m a Christian, and I wanna pray. How ’bout that?”
Really, critiques of this don’t get much better than that.
the lexical form 