I was sitting at the table with a number of priests, one of whom had had a tad too much to drink.  It was a fundraiser banquet for an orthodox Catholic cause, and most of the priests were rather stolid types.  I had just finished explaining the homily I had endured that day.  The Gospel reading was the Woman at the Well, and the homilist had explained to us how this encounter shows how Jesus “grew” in his ministry, how he learned to be less “sexist and judgmental”, and how we, like Jesus, should learn to “grow beyond our boundaries”, that that’s what Lent is all about, learning to “grow beyond your boundaries”.

“Do you know what I would have done?” asked the priest who had thrown back a few.  “At the end of his homily, I would have stood up and said …”  here the priest stood up at the table and expounded in a loud voice, “YOU SON-OF-A-BEECH!” and made an Italian gesture of contempt.  The other clerics stared at him somewhat aghast.

“But,” he said sadly, sitting back down, “I’m a priest and I can’t say that.”

“Well,” I consoled him, “I’m a layman, and I can’t say that either.”

But, my friends, what would happen if we did?

What would happen if we made so much noise that the bad homilist and the effeminate music minister and the angry parish nurse began to hesitate?  If we made them think twice before using their heterodox preaching, subversive music , and secular agendas against the Body of Christ?  If, as they keep telling us, “we are Church”, then why shouldn’t we Church get off our lazy Church butt and shout YOU SON-OF-A-BEECH to the people who are threatening us Church and everything about us?

Chesterton surprises us when he says that feminism is the surrender of women to men – a paradox that only he could see and explain.  Is the great apostasy of modern times partially the result of the surrender of lay Catholics to blind authority?  It would seem to be just the opposite.  We’ve been told since the Council that laymen now have a far greater role in the Church than ever before.   We’ve been told that it’s wrong to heed the old authority, the “hierarchy” and the privilege we once granted them.

But what we have now is a new priesthood, a priesthood of which we – and most clerics – are terrified., the priesthood of the liberals, who bully their way into positions of sham authority that we’re too frightened to stand up and rail against.

The emblematic expression of this new level of authority is the privilege granted to extraordinary ministers of communion.   In the past, liberals were angry that priests gave one another communion before distributing to the rank and file in the pews.  Now the priests give one another communion and take ten minutes to give communion to the twenty or thirty lay “Eucharistic ministers” in shorts and tank-tops who jam themselves around the altar, and who themselves get to receive before distributing to the rank and file in the pews.  We have not seen a layer of authority and privilege wiped out; we’ve seen a new one created.

I’m afraid, however, that we’ve all been brainwashed to believe that it’s wrong to fight for what you love, that the manly virtues that would make a lover of Christ shout “you son-of-a-beech” to someone who’s attacking the divinity of Christ and the common sense and Good News of the Gospel are somehow wrong, that it’s never right to make waves, even when the ship has been taken over by pirates who are doing their best to scuttle it.

Anyway, this is my suggestion for taking back the Church.  The mutineers have made headway in their attempt to hijack the ark, and we need a few brave souls to throw the hijackers out, with the battle cry of, “Let’s roll”,  or at the very least “you son-of-a-beech” – before we’re all wracked and beached for good.