UPDATE: Bishop Stika has responded to our post – you can read his response in this post.
Earlier this week, Bishop Richard Stika of the diocese of Knoxville posted a tweet stating “Mass is Not the worship of Jesus.” His tweet was in response to a supporter of the traditional Latin Mass who cited a recent Pew poll showing that 70% of self-identified Catholics do not believe in the real presences of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, a dogma of the Catholic faith.
When challenge about this response, Bishop Stika posted “We adore Jesus. We worship the Father.”
Bishop Stika’s tweets are inconsistent with Catholic teaching.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
1325 The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit.
The Nicene Creed states:
“And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshiped and glorified.”
Bishop Stika is human and is capable of making a mistake. But instead of acknowledging and correcting his obvious error, Stika instead chose to lock his Twitter account so it could not be accessed by the general public.
TAKE ACTION: Contact Bishop Stika and respectfully ask him to correct his error. Please also be sure to pray for him.