Father Richard:
Christ is in our midst!! He is and always will be!!!
I was very upset to see the sack of Constantinople become a source of humor on a Catholic blog
As well you should be. That having been said, there will always be those who laugh at another's pain and the best we can do, I guess, is pray for souls so jaded or seared that they have so little Christian religious feeling.
Beyond that I guess that for some who still are wholly ignorant of history the ecumenical gesture is seen as some triumphalistic journey to "win back" the Orthodox. And for them we need to pray that the Holy Spirit will enlighten their blindness and darkness.
When I hear of the desecration of the Holy Mysteries in that awful sequence of events--the sack of Constantinople--I return to the little reminder I use when training people for lay ministry in my parish:
the way we treat Our Lord when He lies in our hands is the way He will treat us when we come into His after death. To trample the most precious Person in our earthly reality, lying humbly under the appearances of bread and wine for our nourishment, our adoration, and our humble thanksgiving is something that should leave us all in a state where the hair stands up on the back of our necks in fear and trembling.
In Christ,
BOB
