Cassian Bliss is a 5-year-old American boy, and his favorite game is “playing church”. A video published on September 15 on Instragram shows him reproducing the gestures of the priest during the Tridentine mass. A fine connoisseur of the liturgy, he even wears disguises that could not be more faithful to reality.
He is five years old and already asks to be called “Father Cassian”: this funny face with precise gestures and a serious face is the eldest son of the Bliss family, living in the United States, and his game favorite is to dress up as a priest. In a video shared on September 15 on his mother’s Instagram account , followed by more than 77,000 people, we can see little Cassian dressed in a magnificent red chasuble. He then explains to his mother the details of his liturgical vestment.
“How did you dress?” » asks the latter. “Like a priest,” the toddler responds solemnly. “It’s a chasuble,” he continues before pointing to the black garment underneath: “that’s my cassock,” “and that, my handle, I put on my arm” (strip of fabric that the priest wears it on his left arm, editor’s note). We then see the little priest heading towards his improvised altar where he follows the gestures of the priest celebrating according to the extraordinary form of the Roman rite, with imperturbable seriousness, even having a faithful reproduction of the liturgical objects necessary for the consecration and the Communion.
An imitation game
This game is in fact almost a faithful ritual that Cassian has been following for months, after returning from the Tridentine mass. The little boy used the blankets from his house as a chasuble or cape. Seeing that he didn’t seem to be moving on, his parents decided to buy him the full priest’s paraphernalia. No one knows if this imitation of priestly gestures will lead to real ordination. Many priests and religious have thus “played at mass” in their childhood, like Saints Jean-Marie Vianney and Pius X or even Pope Benedict XVI . One thing is certain, Cassian seems to have already opened, despite his young age, the door of his heart to the priestly vocation.
