Faithful Catholic students at Wyoming Catholic College are concerned over recent inklings being received of what in the words of junior Marcus Gardner “could be” a “master plan to make us all Byzantine”. Why, with a , but the concern that they’re trying to take the community into a whole new dimension along the “trad spectrum” has not only “Liturgy Freaks” but even “Liturgy Hobbyists” like sophomore Evelyn DeSantos of Arizona “on edge” over the school’s “devotion or lack thereof to the Latin Rite liturgies and devotions amidst a new found craze for the ‘eastern practices’ of the Byzantine Rite.”
For WCC this semester not only added a Byzantine Chaplain but even had more “Divine Liturgies” one week than Masses and has cut back on ordinary confession availability to add “Byzantine Confession” making lines for other days all the longer. A classroom in the Augur building was converted to a separate Byzantine chapel and if all this isn’t enough the choir now has focused on performing for Byzantine liturgies rather than Latin, even as tens of times as many students attend the Latin rite liturgies.
Senior Anthony Florensino of Tennessee finds all this crazy, pointless and unneeded, reflecting a feeling IIT feels is general amongst all the students: “There was like three Byzantine people here before all this and yet they somehow ‘found’ a need to add a separate Byzantine chapel, chaplain, sacristan, and more.. It’s just crazy if you ask me.”
Though obviously thus absurd in the abstract Samantha Matthews of Oregon thinks there’s an obvious explanation. “It’s all an overkill response to the loss of Cyril Patton,” she told us, speaking of the Byzantine freshman last year who dropped out in mysterious circumstances, that as Samantha continued, were “because there wasn’t any support for the Byzantine community on campus.”
Like most, she also thinks its overkill concern for the school that more would drop out for this same reason, but a farther out theory comes from freshman Jacinta Rioux of Maine, who connects the fact that rumors that the school’s Dean is Byzantine to the idea that he’s catering everything to his community. “It’s obvious. He wants all to be Byzantine. Walk into Augur and you literally smell it in the air. Pretty soon they’ll start cutting out the Sunday morning Tridentine Mass and if Fr. Ward ever leaves they’ll just say ‘tough luck’ and have all liturgies be Byzantine.”
School officials did not respond to a request for comment on these allegations but Byzantine Rite sacristan Timothee Dominick of Illinois would “say nothing to confirm nor deny these rumors”. Over time more people are coming out and publicly identifying as Byzantine, IIT surveys report, so whether or not it’s intended, Jacinta’s claim is starting to come true and even many other professors are starting to support the Byzantine community as with Dr. Baxter with his now famous catch phrase, “this is a deliciously smelling church”.
As of Saturday IIT’s Average Muslim Liturgist claims “direct knowledge” that Marcus Gardner is right telling us exclusively that he can “absolutely affirm these rumors of the school’s plans” and that there will be more “evidence of it in the coming weeks.”