Edit: this year Crashed Ice, featured by same-sex promoting Red Bull, is back again. The venue isn't AS appealing and sacrilegious, but it is. For those of you who don't know, "Crashed Ice" involves the Archbishop's prostituting of the Cathedral for a winter sporting event where eager competitors careen down a ramp that leads from the top of the St. Paul Cathedral steps down the hill and into downtown Saint Paul for amazing cash prizes and the adulation of thousands of fans on TV and live.
We understand that the powers and principalities who rule this Archdiocese have to take care of paying large salaries to diocesan pay staff, despite the huge subsidies they receive for being a warden of the welfare state, cush retirments, trips to Thailand, and other things like that, but is it really worth it when there is serious damage to the Catholic brand by appealing to satanic corporations and vulgar sports fans, that actually work against the primary Catholic message? How many people are actually persuaded by these boondoggles, we wonder?
Last year we made a big deal about this and generated some sissies on the blog commenting who made mostly pointless objections and idle threats to our concerns. Catholic education has always been very poor in Minnesota, and it only shows, that when a lot of these concerned citizens chime in, they have nothing but emotions and half-baked sentiments with which to reply.
This year the ramp has been moved further down from the cathedral door, which now you can see, but the ramp comes down from the top of the steps. It's like they realized how crappy it looked last year and made some adjustments. Also, the crowd is only projected at 100,000, which is down 20 from last year's estimated 120,000.
At any rate, this is still an appalling bad show on the part of the stewards of our Catholic Faith in this Archdiocese. Some of the readers will ask, "are you surprised?" No, not after witnessing years and years of their negligence and neglect. What would be shocking is if there were ever an orthodox clergy, with an orthodox Archbishop. Have we ever had one?
We'll conclude this discussion with:
Can. 1210 In a sacred place only those things are to be permitted which serve to exercise or promote worship, piety and religion. Anything out of harmony with the holiness of the place is forbidden. The Ordinary may however, for individual cases, permit other uses, provided they are not contrary to the sacred character of the place.
