Side Show

A friend—Nathaniel Peters, our former Junior Fellow, now at Notre Dame—sends a note pointing out this video of a liturgy at a Call to Action meeting a while back:

The liturgical puppets seem to be about ten feet tall, four feet of which are their huge, dreadlocked liturgical heads, and they have huge flat hands that look like oversized Ping-Pong paddles. Liturgical Ping-Pong paddles.

The puppets are coaxed down the aisle by the liturgical dancers at the start of the liturgy, only to wander back up the aisle during the Gloria, perhaps because the liturgical dancers were not supervising, but twirling and sprinkling the congregation with holy water. All in all, a lively liturgical circus.

And yet, don’t most circuses have children at them? I mean, aren’t they supposed to be for the young? In the congregation itself there doesn’t seem to be a single person under age fifty at the Call to Action liturgy.

It’s sad, really. These people genuinely thought they were the future, once upon a time, and the future didn’t even bother to oppose them. It just went along its own path, leaving the bleating sounds of liturgical puppet dance to fade away, off to the side, down one of the false trails of history.