Whence Come These Puppets of Doom?

Call to Action closing liturgy, 2008.

Whence Come These Puppets of Doom? | John B. Buescher | Catholic World Report



“Liturgical puppets” have shown up in churches for years, but aren't limited to Catholic venues—they have long been used as agents of iconoclasm and revolutionary agitprop.

“We sit by and
watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not
afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old
certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are
watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no
smile.”

— Hilaire Belloc, This That and the Other (1912)

I, for one,
hesitate to welcome our new puppet overlords.

They visited the 2008 West Coast Call to
Action Conference closing liturgy, the video of which the proprietors of the Orate Fratres
blog have linked under the title “Mr. Potato Head Concelebrates the Holy Mass?”

Other recent
sightings (among many) are documented on the web, showing one puppet floating through a nave at a
Minneapolis church’s Palm Sunday Mass, and several puppets pausing for a few
moments from Speaking Truth to the Man to pose with their human wards,
stimulating the owner of the Bad Vestments blog to ask, “What is up with
leftists and giant papier-mâché puppets of doom?”

Sightings of the
large, sad variety of “liturgical puppets” go back some years, and are by no
means limited to Catholic venues. Episcopalians, unsurprisingly, have paraded
them down the aisle of St. John the Divine Cathedral. And St. Michael’s
Episcopal Parish in Litchfield, Connecticut supports the Colossal Puppet Theater Company.
In recent years, puppets have appeared in many denominations’ services.

All of which has
elicited enraged incomprehension in some quarters—what is the point of these
visitations into the sanctuary?

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