Following is an eyewitness account from the Chrism Mass at Sacred Heart Cathedral earlier this week.

Unfortunately, most of the Mass was rather disappointing. After the brief moment of prayer preceding Mass, there was a musical call to prayer, which featured an exorbitantly flamboyant male dancing around altar. Since Mass had not yet begun, I simply tried to ignore the behavior in hopes that once the Mass was underway, such absurdity would cease. Sadly, he continued to prance about throughout every song, hymn, psalm, or otherwise musical part of the Mass except the Eucharistic Prayer and Communion Hymn. It was truly a disgraceful liturgical abuse, the Gospel Acclamation in particular. This rather oddly dressed fellow danced about carrying the Evangeliary around the altar, in what would be the Cathedral’s version of a sanctuary, and to the ambo. This entire behavior, from start to finish, did more to detract from the Mass than add to it. In short, it was distracting, strange, and otherwise unpleasant.

And from the Vatican’s Congregation of Divine Worship:

For that reason it(liturgical dance) cannot be introduced into liturgical celebrations of any kind whatever: that would be to inject into the liturgy one of the most desacralized and desacralizing elements; and so it would be equivalent to creating an atmosphere of profaneness which would easily recall to those present and to the participants in the celebration worldly places and situations.

From an article in the Adoremus Bulletin:

The current attempt to promote dance as part of Catholic Liturgy embodies several contradictory tendencies, among them ethnic particularism and the “rediscovery” of a putative collective cultural identity; the individualistic “quest for the self” common to many New Age spiritualities; and the calculated neo-pagan effort “to be absorbed in the whole of nature” and to express “the god/dess within”.

And from Cardinal Arinze, who headed the Congregation for Divine Worship at the time he made these comments:

There has never been a document from our Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments saying that dance is approved in the Mass.

Why make the people of God suffer so much? Haven’t we enough problems already? Only Sunday, one hour, they come to adore God. And you bring a dance! Are you so poor you have nothing else to bring us? Shame on you!