What times these are!

What times these are! 

By Father Moisés Carmona Rivera (1912-1991)

Taken from: http://lascadenasdeobligado.blogspot.mx/2014/12/

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

             “What times! Quite so strange are ours
          in which things like these can happen!
          And I ask myself how can
          such outlandish things transpire!”
          Muttering that, 's how my friend
          one day stepped out of the temple.
         “Hush, said I, don´t be so simple
          you first have to understand!

         “That, in this New Order Mass,
          out of satanic device
          no longer 's there sacrifice
          it's just turned into a meal.
          In his Chapter number eight
          Daniel left us testimony
          that out of mad rage the demon
          sacrifice to God abolished.”

         “This is why now we are told
          with such an awful insistence
          that Mass is just an assembly,
          a meal, a banquet or mess,
          and that now the priest's no longer
          as he was, the one who offers.
          he´s only the one presiding,
          posh character, more or less.”

         “That's why, because it's no Mass,
          everything's done on a table
          and to no one is it strange
          that they have removed the altar
          That's why, because it's a banquet,
          it is done with so much racket,
          and with music quite so weird,
          it makes all the people swing.”

          Here, my friend dares to interrupt me
         “So, that´s why I've seen the priest
          turn always his back on Christ
          and not kneel, not even once.”
         “Well, of course — responded I —
          Who ever kneels at a banquet?
          In comedies or in theaters,
          who do you see on his knees?"

         “If the mass is only that,
          as it's being taught these days,
          the Eucharist is no longer.
          And I see that it's alright
          for the priest in a stern tone
          to order anyone around him:”
         “Open, kid, the tabernacle
          and start handing out communion!”

         "And it figures that the nuns,
          so customarily cloistral,
          should inherit from the vestal
          their remarkable decorum,
          and that, mini-skirted women
          should enter the Holy of Holies
          so that their charms may delight
          the New Christianity followers."

         "My goodness!" my friend concluded,
          ill-tempered and annoyed,
         "How dangerous and atrocious
          a future can be envisaged!
          If the Perpetual Oblation
          has from the altars been abolished,
          rivers of blood will be running
          and the World will just go under!"