FAST FOOD AD 2025: Thirty-Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD AD 2025: Thirty-Fifth Helping

I believe from my observations at daily Mass for over 75 years that the Old Testament readings, excluding the presence of selective Psalms, in the Liturgy of the Word at Mass are immensely spiritually destructive. I recognize the cognitive theological and liturgical reasons for including them, and at the level of abstract thinking they appear appropriate. But, in practice so many of them are contrary to the teaching of Jesus when they are read as a brief isolated text in the Mass. When what Jesus teaches as evil in the Gospels is paraded out at Mass in a short Old Testament reading as good or even commanded by God, e.g., genocide or praying that the heads of the enemy’s children be dashed upon the rocks, etc., etc., etc.,to which the Christian congregation in unison responds, “Thanks be to God,” then we leave many in the congregation after Mass exiting the Church and living with an incarnational Principle of Non-Contradiction spiritual and conscience conundrum of the first order—which most Christians resolve by choosing to follow Old Testament violence route they heard at Mass over Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies.

There are no Old Testament readings in the 1500 year old Divine Liturgy (Mass) of the Eastern Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Churches