See, with balloons you get a low Mass and a high Mass

Loopy liturgists here in North America will be as pleased as orthodox Catholics will be appalled by the following:

Lifeteen Mass, European style?

Unless strongly repudiated, this event will be dragged out by AmChurch as Exhibit A of Vatican acceptance of all manner of liturgical nonsense over here.

My first impulse is to defend good Cardinal Schonborn, general editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, holy Dominican scholar and priest (with whom I had the good fortune of spending some time when he visited Steubenville). Was he blind-sided? Is that a credible explanation? The official spokeshole for the Austrian archdiocese attacks everything and everyone except the event itself and how it was staged, suggesting full knowledge.

I don't think you need to be a foaming traditionalist to be very disturbed by this. Reactions around the blogsphere among orthodox Catholics are not good. Liturgical abuse is not really too strong a term in this case: Prayer card balloons released during the Mass (what is it the balloon fetish?); wooden ciboria; St. Louis Jesuit-style ceramic chalices; tie-die vestments; obnoxious rock guitars jangling in the background; strobe lights; rave lasers; deep dish pizza-sized eucharistic bread (Great for falling crumbles! If that recipe is kosher with the rubrics, I'm the Easter bunny.)

Maybe this brand of infantilization of the divine liturgy is what helped made an atheist out of a former Lifeteen music leader I know....(With all deference to the good that some Lifeteen Masses have done, etc., ipso facto, yadda blah, and so on.)