Bishop Strickland: Novus Ordo Mass, Priestly Formation Have Led to Problems in the Church

I've said for years that NO clergy are no longer Priests offering Sacrifice but celibate social workers in collars, which is one of the reasons for the push for a married Priesthood.

From LifeSiteNews

By Raymond Wolfe

Bishop Joseph Strickland said the ‘more comfortable’ Novus Ordo Mass has shifted priests toward acting like ‘social workers’ and declared that the Latin Mass ‘will stay with us’ in a recent interview.

Bishop Joseph Strickland said that the shift to the Novus Ordo Mass from the Traditional Latin Mass has led to a decline in the priesthood and called out the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for pushing bishops to “forget that they’re successors of the Apostles.” 

The former bishop of Tyler, Texas, who was removed from his diocese by Pope Francis in 2023 after criticizing the pope’s heterodoxy, faulted the more “comfortable” and less “sacral” approach of the Novus Ordo Mass in a more than three-hour interview on March 20 with Conor Gallagher, the CEO of traditional Catholic publisher TAN Books. 

In the interview, Bishop Strickland recounted his upbringing in the small, overwhelmingly Protestant town of Atlanta in east Texas, where he attended Mass as a child at a mission church that his parents helped establish. 

When he had “time in town to kill,” he said, “I just went to the church and prayed. Nobody told me that’s a good thing to do, I just knew, you know, because being Catholic was the best thing we had as a family.” 

Bishop Strickland noted in the interview that he begins each day with one hour of Eucharistic adoration and did as many as three hours a day as bishop of Tyler. He credited adoration and the Holy Rosary with giving him the strength to “stand up against” corrupt Church authorities and to say, “Well, okay, if you have to remove me, that’s what will happen, but I’m not going to backpedal on the truth that I believe Christ is telling us to teach and to share.” 

The Texas bishop also shared his vocation story and how he attended an “orthodox” seminary after the Second Vatican Council where he nevertheless had “no exposure” to the Traditional Latin Mass and “wasn’t taught” about the centrality of the Eucharist for the priesthood. 

Novus Ordo Mass, priestly formation have led to problems in Church

Bishop Strickland attributed the crisis in the modern Church to the desacralization of the Mass and to formation that envisions priests as social workers.

The problems in the Church “really are rooted in many ways in the formation of priests to be active, out there, doing good things, setting up food pantries, and doing all this stuff, and having this program and that program and another program,” he said. 

However, Bishop Strickland revealed that he came to understand through a deepening of his prayer life “that being a priest primarily happens at the Eucharistic altar.” 

“That is the core, that is the lifeblood, that is the epicenter of a priest’s life,” he stressed, though he “wasn’t taught that.” 

“It wasn’t really the emphasis. It was, you know, kind of a Church that had been desacralized in many ways,” he lamented, including with the abandonment of the Traditional Latin Mass. 

Bishop Strickland’s comments echo Venerable Pope Pius XII, who said, “There are indeed many forms of activity that a priest can exercise for the salvation of the modern world; but only one of them is without a doubt the most worthy, the most effective, and the most lasting in its effects: to act as dispenser of the Holy Eucharist, after first nourishing himself abundantly.” 

“His work would not be that of a priest, if he, even through zeal for souls, put his Eucharistic vocation second,” the pontiff stated. 

Bishop Strickland said that, in the wake of Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the Novus Ordo Mass, “I think all of that really began to shift the priesthood more into being a social worker, a good man, and doing good things but not being a priest of Jesus Christ.” 

“There are lots of factors, but I think that one of the critical is, you know, the liturgy was not as sacral,” he said. “That was the objective: make it simpler, make it more something comfortable with this world.” 

“It’s not this mystical event every Sunday that it really is, but that was the emphasis, and I think that’s bled into what do priests do, what do bishops do,” he observed. 

Bishop Strickland explained that he “was trained very much as a Novus Ordo priest,” describing the new Mass as a “barebones Eucharistic sacrifice, and even sacrifice wasn’t emphasized, it was the communal gathering.” 

He also related how he began celebrating the Latin Mass in 2020, more than 30 years after being ordained as a priest. His first Latin Mass was a “profound experience,” Bishop Strickland said. “I remember the actual consecration, I mean, you’re only whispering anyway, but I could hardly get the words out. It was very emotional.” 

“The Traditional Latin Mass will stay with us,” he declared and predicted that “those who want to totally eliminate it” will fail, citing the “supernatural focus” of the traditional liturgy. 

“I try to celebrate the Novus Ordo Mass with great reverence and great focus on the supernatural but the Traditional Latin Mass, in my experience, you’d almost have to fight against it being supernatural, you know, it’s just the way it is,” with its many genuflections, signs of the cross, bows, and other signs, the prelate said. 

READ: New DC Cardinal McElroy has long record of promoting LGBT ideology, downplaying abortion

USCCB pushes bishops to ‘forget that they are successor of the Apostles’ 

In the interview with Gallagher, Bishop Strickland additionally discussed how bishops are trained to be “managers” and “businessmen.” 

He recalled a moment around December 2016, after having been the bishop of Tyler for four years, when he decided to reject the “management-style” approach and commit speaking the truth, regardless of the consequences. 

“I really remember sitting in my office and saying, ‘Are you going to be the management-style bishop, you know, that I was witnessing – go to meetings, get on committees, do all this stuff – or are you going to teach the truth?’” he said. 

“More and more what the truth means to me is a person, is Jesus Christ, Truth Incarnate, so I really feel like I was answering a call to speak for Christ in a very clear way, willing to make whatever sacrifices to speak His truth,” Bishop Strickland stated. 

“And so I did make that decision, and, as I’ve said to people, you know, it’s been hell on wheels in some ways ever since then, because opposition, and it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re getting out of line here, you’re not following the plan, you’re not being a good manager,’” he continued. 

The Texas prelate said that he was accused of “lack of fraternity” toward other bishops because he was “saying things that were not comfortable.” 

He noted that pushback from the “institutional Church” against him started “really ramping up” after the USCCB’s November 2018 meeting, which followed explosive homosexual abuse revelations about now-former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. 

During the meeting, Bishop Strickland denounced the promotion of LGBT activist Jesuit priest James Martin, who has criticized Catholic teaching about homosexuality, encouraged homosexual relationships, and organized heterodox, pro-LGBT conferences. 

Several bishops, including Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the former archbishop of Atlanta and Washington, D.C., have invited Martin to speak in their dioceses. Cardinal Robert McElroy, the current archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, have also strongly praised his LGBT activism.

“Do we believe the doctrine of the Church or not?” Bishop Strickland questioned fellow bishops at the meeting. 

Unfortunately, bishops are “encouraged to be part of the Texas Catholic Conference, to be part of the USCCB, and to kind of forget that they’re successors of the Apostles,” Bishop Strickland said in the Thursday interview. 

Boldly declaring the truth is “a very different path of being a bishop in the 21st century than most bishops are on and, frankly, [a] different path than the Church encourages” due to “the structure of the USCCB.” 

“And I’ve heard bishops say, ‘Well, you know, I’m not going to make a statement. What did the USCCB put out about this?’” It’s like, you’re the apostle of your diocese, you should know better than anyone what your flock needs, and that to me that’s not been the focus,” Bishop Strickland said. 

“I was accused of not being fraternal then,” he added, “but … as a bishop I’m supposed to just go against what I believe in principle is the right thing and, frankly, with some of these things I think I was proven to be on the right side, but that’s not the way the management school wanted it to work.” 

Bishop Strickland notably clashed with the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, for example, when they publicly opposed a mother’s efforts to save her disabled baby daughter, whom doctors had determined to remove from life support because of her “quality of life.” 

The Tyler bishop, however, urged the Texas Supreme Court to protect the girl, Tinslee Lewis, who was eventually released from the hospital in 2022. 

Bishop Strickland’s case is similar to that of Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres of Puerto Rico, another outspoken defender of Catholic teaching who was removed by Pope Francis in 2022 with no official explanation, reportedly due to his support for conscience objections to COVID shots and because he was insufficiently “fraternal.” 

Pope Francis’ nuncio pressured Bishop Strickland to be quiet 

Bishop Strickland told Gallagher that he faced pressure from Pope Francis’ nuncio to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and USCCB leadership to stop speaking out. 

“I had a few phone calls from the nuncio saying, ‘Bishop Strickland, you know, you need to cool it,’” he recounted. “It’s like, well, if it’s the truth, I don’t know that I can cool it.” 

He added that his removal was due to allegations that he was “disrespectful to Pope Francis” and “wasn’t fraternal.” Bishop Strickland has previously accused Francis of “undermining the Deposit of Faith” and criticized his heterodox initiatives, like the Synod on Synodality. 

The prelate said in the interview that Pope Francis “seems to have gone beyond ambiguity to really challenging what the truth of the Church teaches,” citing his endorsement of homosexual “blessings” and how he “writes friendly notes” to James Martin. 

He described the Church under Francis as “like a family with an alcoholic father,” pointing out that “we’re respectful” to human authority but that “obedience ultimately is to God.” 

“I ultimately made that choice. I have to be obedient to the truth that is Christ,” he said. 

“There wasn’t any specific quote” cited as the reason for his removal, Bishop Strickland said, “but I would say, in general, I was speaking out in ways that were they found disruptive.” 

“For the manager side, you don’t want to be disruptive.” 

Bishop Strickland said that he thinks his ousting “was orchestrated to send signals to the other bishops, because they were meeting the day after it was announced that I was removed or relieved.” 

“I can’t be told to quit teaching Truth Incarnate because it doesn’t fit the synodal model in the modern Church,” he insisted. “I was directly told to quit talking about it, ‘Quit talking about the Deposit of Faith.’ It’s like, ‘Quit doing my job.’” 

“But to me I can’t understand how someone who is saying the Deposit of Faith needs to be changed, and this word needs to be taken out of the Catechism, we need to change all this, we need to totally reinterpret Sacred Scripture that we’ve known for centuries, I can’t understand,” Bishop Strickland said. 

Cupich, McElroy, Tobin, and Martin have all suggested that the Catechism should be changed to no longer say that homosexuality is “disordered.” 

“They don’t know the Jesus Christ that I know,” Bishop Strickland said. “I guess I can put it that way. What He says is in conflict with that.”