The King of the Feeding Trough
“When traditionalists attack Masses for not being reverent or God centric enough, they forget Christ Himself chose to be presented to the world in a feeding trough. He chose to be born a slave, not as king to lord it over us.”
Thomas Polega is a Roman Catholic layman and critic of traditionalism. He describes himself on Twitter as
(He/Him) #Catholic. Computer science student. DOMINUS MEUS ET DEUS MEUS
It’s interesting that he/him’s bio includes the word “Dominus” to describe our Lord Jesus. At least in that context, he/him confesses our Lord Jesus Christ as “Lord,” not as a “slave.”
He clearly doesn’t understand the two natures of our Lord, nor his humiliation and exaltation. Polega, like many liberal Christians, interprets Socialist and Marxist politics and economics as essential features of the Christian confession. This focus on the humiliation of Jesus, upon His human nature, to the detriment of His exaltation, His divine nature, is a facet of that. His disdain for liturgical dignity and reverence is “justified” by the coming of our Lord in humility.
In His rescue mission to save mankind, our Lord was dropped covertly behind enemy lines. The defeat of Satan by a baby born of a woman “of humble estate” (Luke 1:48) is a humiliation of the devil. The humiliation of our Lord is temporary. The humiliation of Satan is eternal.
Polega focuses on Phil 2:6-8:
though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
but forgets to continue to verses 9-11:
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
There are such opponents of liturgy and reverence in our own communion as well. They display the same faux humility that would denude our churches of artwork and scrub them of beauty - in the pursuit of a Gnostic, puritanical minimalism and iconoclasm more in line with church bodies that eschew sacraments. They gaslight and put words in our mouths. They fight a strawman that doesn’t exist: that we say the Divine Service must take place surrounded by opulence. There is not a single “Gottesdienst” pastor who has not brought the Presence of Jesus into humble - and even worse - situations: in the wreckage of accidents and disasters, in the hospital, in the homes of the seriously ill, the bedridden, etc. Some stewards of the mysteries bring the sacred elements to soldiers in mud, blood, and carnage, as well as into prisons.
Our Lord comes in His Word and in His body and blood in the Mass in the dirtiest and most humble of settings. He is King over all, and no square inch of this fallen world is exempt from His presence, not even the sullied and soiled. Jesus has come to reclaim and redeem the world, and all creation, from the diabolical pretender.
That said, there is a difference between the usual and the unusual.
In the typical setting when and where God’s people assemble, and where God Himself is present by means of a miracle and according to His Word and promise, God expresses a preference for beauty. As with the other transcendentals: goodness and truth, God towers above the wreckage of our fallen world and the flotsam and jetsam of those who would defiantly ask God, “Just who do You think You are?”
God Himself is clear in Exodus 26-31 as to what His preferred “worship space” should look like, how it should feel and smell, and what kind of art and architecture is fitting in His presence according to His preference. And again, we see beauty: art, precious metals, glorious gemstones, priestly vestments, and exquisite textiles, we see reverence and order - all of the things that Polega and his ilk hold in contempt.
Moreover, false humility does not teach us what we need to know about Christ (AC 24:3-4). We already discern that He is accessible to us in the humility of the simple elements themselves. But in addition to this “veiling” of our Lord under bread and wine, we must also confess His dominion (Dominus) and His divinity (Deus) in the sacrament. And that is not seen in the Eucharist except by the eyes of faith.
And this is where the reverence and the beauty of our worship in its regular setting, week in and week out, confess the very thing Polega claims to confess: that Jesus is “Dominus meus et Deus meus.”